McConnell Marks Decade Since Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

Press Release

“Nearly twenty years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union as the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century.’

And for decades, he has worked incessantly to revive the repressive empire built by Stalin, including by redrawing European borders by force.

In 2008, he sent the Russian military to bring Georgia, a sovereign democracy, to heel. His forces occupy parts of that country right up to today.

And precisely ten years ago today, Putin launched a military invasion into Ukraine to seize Crimea and the Donbas region.

Of course, today isn’t an anniversary of a settled event in the past. It’s a mile-marker in a campaign of subjugation, brutality, and conquest that remains very much alive.

Over the past ten years, Putin’s invasion has grown from an initial incursion by ‘little green men’ to a massive ground campaign to seize all of Ukraine. But as Russian aggression escalated, two things remained the same:

First, the incredible resolve of the Ukrainian people to defend their sovereignty.

And second, the tendency of western partners capable of supporting Ukraine’s defense to hesitate instead.

Think about America’s own behavior back in 2014. President Obama was six years removed from a promise to ‘reset’ relations with Russia, and little more than a year removed from mocking his opponent on the presidential debate stage for warning of the threat posed by Putin.

As he put it smugly to our colleague, Senator Romney, ‘the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.’ That same year, then Vice-President Biden said our colleague from Utah was, ‘mired in a Cold War mindset.’

Of course, the Obama-Biden Administration didn’t just scoff at realism on Russia. They assiduously avoided it!

When Ukraine’s pro-Western, democratic leaders faced an incursion by highly-trained Russia troops, they begged for lethal weapons to defend their sovereign territory.

But the Obama-Biden Administration worried about escalation and sent non-lethal supplies like blankets and MREs instead.

The next year, the West’s collective failure to support Ukraine militarily or impose meaningful costs on Russia resulted in cease-fire agreements that at best would have frozen the conflict in place, had Putin actually respected them.

Even as the next Administration moved to provide lethal assistance and training for Ukraine and began the process of rebuilding our own military strength, too few European allies were taking Russian aggression – or their own pledges to increase defense spending after Putin’s 2014 invasion – seriously enough.

Unfortunately, President Biden compounded the problems he helped sow back when he was Vice-President.

From a disastrous, credibility-shredding withdrawal from Afghanistan. To his costly refusal to steer European allies away from reliance on Russia, especially Russian energy.

It’s not a mystery why Putin was undeterred.

The weakness and indecision that defined the Obama-Biden Administration’s response to Putin’s 2014 invasion have echoed in the Biden-Harris Administration’s response to his 2022 escalation.

For months as Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s borders… And for months as their brutal campaign got underway… the Biden White House mostly managed to deter itself from equipping Ukraine at the speed of relevance.

This is not to say that Western allies and partners aren’t making historic investments in deterring common threats. The free world is, indeed, waking up.

In the last two years, NATO allies have spent more than $120 billion on cutting-edge U.S. weapons and capabilities while also making historic investments in their own defense industrial capacity.

And just think of the lessons Russian aggression is teaching about the interconnected nature of the threats that we face.

Consider how unwaveringly our allies in the Indo-Pacific have supported Ukraine’s fight, in word and deed.

As Taiwan’s foreign minister put it over the weekend, on the two-year anniversary of the 2022 escalation, Ukraine’s resistance was, ‘showing us what fighting spirit is, and passing it on to Taiwan.’

Or take the encouraging news just yesterday that Sweden is now finally poised to become the newest member of the trans-Atlantic alliance. I visited Stockholm and Helsinki in a show of solidarity last March when their parliaments voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining NATO.

“There is just no question that Sweden and Finland joining the most successful military alliance in human history will further contribute advanced capabilities to our collective security and make the West, and America, safer.

Across the world, America’s allies and partners have drawn sobering lessons from the latest chapter of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But we have yet to learn some of the same lessons ourselves.

It’s time to recognize how passivity, half-measures, and delay brought the West to this moment, and where they’ll take us if we don’t reject them and chart a new course.

We should reflect on the mistakes of the Obama-Biden Administration – the failure to respond forcefully to aggression. And we should resolve not to make these same mistakes ourselves.

For ten years, our adversary has showed us by his actions that Russia’s appetite for conquest grows with the eating.

We can no longer afford to pretend otherwise.”

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