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Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am grateful to follow my friend--and he is a friend--the Senator from Kansas, who stated very eloquently a number of challenges that lie ahead and the reasons we do have to come together on a bipartisan basis to make America and the world more secure.

Like him, I found last week to be both frustrating and discouraging, but I have been heartened, first, by the overwhelming bipartisan votes in this Chamber in favor of aid to Ukraine--in fact, in support of a bipartisan compromise that included aid to Ukraine and provided a temporary extension of funding, which eventually became the core of the measure adopted by the House.

I have been encouraged as well by the leadership of Senator Schumer and Senator McConnell in coming together with Senator Collins and Senator Murray to say that we will fulfill our obligation to Ukraine and that we will do it promptly.

That is why I am on the floor of the Senate right now--to emphasize the urgency of making sure that we provide Ukraine with the tools, the financial support, the humanitarian assistance, and the arms that it needs to win. And it can win. It is making solid, steady progress. I have seen the maps. I have visited Ukraine four times in the last 18 months. Ukraine can win, and it will win if we provide Ukraine with the tools it needs, but it must be done now.

We owe it to the men and women who are in those trenches right now, bleeding and dying, and who are watching America.

We owe it to the leadership of Ukraine, President Zelenskyy, who has asked me on each of those four visits: Will the United States stay by our side? And I have assured him that, yes, we will be solid.

We owe it to our allies who are also watching--our allies and our adversaries. And, make no mistake, the Chinese have changed their view of whether they can count on the United States to fail and falter, because, so far, we have stood strong, sending a message to China about what we would do if China invades Taiwan.

The world is watching, and history is watching.

To my colleagues, there are few, if any, votes you will take or actions by which you will be measured more intently and importantly than what we do right now--not months away but days away--on what we must do in the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

I urge the administration to take whatever action is necessary-- again, not just in statements, not just in words, but in deeds.

Ukraine is waiting for the longer range artillery, the ATACMS, that it needs to pound targets where the Russians gather intelligence, where they store supplies, where they conduct their leadership. Those ATACMS are necessary--not just the HIMARS but the longer range artillery. We need to train the pilots. That can be done under existing authority and financial support. They need to provide munitions--we are producing more, but Ukraine continues to use them at a rate of roughly 10 times or 15 what we are providing; drones, which have become the new fulcrum of the battlefield not only to gather intelligence but to deliver the kind of ordnance that we need to provide.

These actions by the administration can be done with existing funding. But the fact of the matter is that, as of this week or just days afterward, the Pentagon may well run out of funding for new weapons platforms. Without an immediate replenishment, it cannot, over the longer term, provide Ukraine with critical systems, like the air defense platforms, that Ukraine needs to protect its civilians as well as its military targets. Winter is approaching, and Russia will continue to bombard its infrastructure unless it has that air defense. Those systems, the hospitals, the schools, the grid for electricity are now supremely susceptible to that kind of air bombardment.

We know Patriot air defense works. I have seen it myself in the midst of air raids on Kyiv, where I went to the bunker and Kyiv's air defense successfully fended off those missiles and drones that were coming after it.

We know the urgency of those ATACMS. We have heard it from the Ukrainians. We have heard it from our own military about how important they can be. I urge the administration to provide that longer range artillery as soon as it can do so.

But we have a larger task ahead of us. The supplemental at $24 billion is a necessary start right now. We can take advantage of the bipartisan agreement that we have expressed in this Chamber and in the House to make it happen, to move quickly and promptly.

I recognize there is turmoil in the House of Representatives. I am clear-eyed about the possibility of growing fatigue among the American people. But it is on us in the U.S. Senate. It is on us as leaders to make the case and convince America that it is on us and in our interest because if we fail now to make this investment, the costs will be far greater when Putin wins.

We will have the need not just to provide weapons platforms but troops on the ground because that will be our treaty obligation if Putin then goes against Romania, Poland, Moldova, Finland, and Sweden. He will pick one of them.

We know he will be on the march if he wins in Ukraine, and we will have proved him right about our faltering and failing. It will encourage not only him but also China, and we will have a far greater cost. It is our national security on the line. Ukrainians are fighting for our future, not just theirs; for our independence and freedom, not just their own.

We have a national security interest in this fight, and we need to make the American people understand it.

Sometimes history is personal. Sometimes it is shaped by a leader who has the courage and strength to step forward and put his life on the line. That is what Volodymyr Zelenskyy has done. He has inspired the people of Ukraine and the people around the world by staying in Ukraine and providing that leadership that is so important.

I once asked him how he thought it would end. He said: In the end, it will be fine. And if it is not fine, it is not the end. They are determined, as he told me, to fight with pitch forks, if necessary. But we can't let them fight with pitch forks. We need to give them what they need to be successful and to vindicate the losses they have suffered.

I have seen them in Bucha, the mass grave sites, where women and children had hands tied behind their backs, shot in the head, hundreds of them--a repeat of Stalin and Hitler in their killing of innocent people in exactly those ``bloodlands,'' as Professor Snyder has called them.

We have all seen images of cities leveled, literally destroyed, not just Bakhmut but Mariupol. We have heard about children kidnapped from areas that Russia has occupied. I have talked to the prosecutor general about those thousands of children--literally thousands--taken from their parents, supposedly orphans, but their parents were still alive and parents taken away from children to Belarus.

There is a reason why the International Court of Criminal Justice has issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and why he would be judged a war criminal if he ever were brought to trial--because he has committed atrocities that have no match in recent history for their scale and scope and their brutality.

We are dealing with someone who has no respect for human life--either Ukrainian life or Russian life--because he will continue to send his people into the maw like cannon fire.

In the face of that evil, the Ukrainians are determined. But we need to match their courage and strength with the resources that they need and with the arms that they need.

Sometimes history is personal in what it means to us. My own dad left Germany in 1935. He came to this country at the age of 17. He spoke virtually no English. He had not much more than the shirt on his back. He knew no one. He left Germany alone at the age of 17 because he saw what was coming. He succeeded in bringing over his parents and his siblings and lost the rest of his family to the kind of brutality and atrocity that we are witnessing right now at the hands of Vladimir Putin.

History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. Evil often does repeat, even if it is not by the same people against the same people. What we are seeing now is evil. There are very few places in the world or conflicts or circumstances where there is, in fact, no gray area--black and white, good and evil.

The world is watching now to see how we will keep faith: keep faith with our allies that have invested along with us at our side, keep faith with the people of Ukraine, and maybe most important, keep faith with ourselves and with our values.

We are being watched not just by the world but by history. And our values and our self-image, our ability to look ourselves in the mirror and say, ``Yes, we did our job,'' is now what is at stake.

History will remember us either as paragons of liberty or ineffectual bystanders.

We can't wait for 45 days. We need a supplemental now. The men and women in the trenches of Ukraine can't wait 45 days for bullets and bandages. The people in Kyiv facing this winter without, potentially, food and electricity can't wait 45 days to know that we will stand by them. They are fighting for their future, for the dreams of independence and democracy.

We are the most powerful, wealthiest, and the greatest Nation in the world not simply because of the example of our power but the power of our example.

There are a lot of folks--and I was one of them--who are discouraged and frustrated, as I said right at the start, about the ability of our democracy to work, given what we went through over these past days. But we can show our values and our democracy at its best if we help the Ukrainians at this moment of unparalleled crisis for them.

If we delay and falter, we lose time, and the loss of time and delay essentially means defeat.

I urge my colleagues to join me to find a way forward, a path to vote as soon as possible to make that aid available to Ukraine. It is our obligation and our opportunity, at this critical moment in our history, when the world is watching and when others, long from now, will look back and watch what we did or failed to do.

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