Thomas Breen photo
U.S. Sen. Murphy on the Green on Friday.
The morning after Congress signed off on more than $13 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, U.S. Sen Chris Murphy of Connecticut called on the United States to “bring [Russian President Vladimir Putin] to his knees through sanctions, and rescue as many Ukrainians from that country as we have the capability to do.”
Murphy offered that assessment Friday morning when asked about the ongoing war in Ukraine at the end of an unrelated press conference on the New Haven Green (about federal money bringing electric buses to the state).
Murphy sits on the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. He and fellow Connecticut U.S. Sen Richard Blumenthal visited Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy in Kyiv in January with a promise to provide the country with military aid, but not troops on the ground.
Thursday marked two weeks since Russia kicked off a military invasion of its now war-torn Eastern European neighbor. Since then, as the Russian military bombards smaller cities and wreaks havoc across the country while apparently en route to the capital of Kyiv, at least 549 civilians have been killed and another 957 wounded, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. More than two million people have fled Ukraine because of Russia’s military invasion.
Late Thursday night, the U.S. Senate passed a nearly $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that includes around $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine. That bipartisan bill, which has already been cleared by the U.S. House of Representatives, now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
At a Ukrainian support rally on the Green last Sunday.
First: What’s in the bill for Ukraine?
Roughly half of the $13 billion-plus allocation will “go to directly supporting the defense of Ukraine and the defense of NATO allies,” Murphy said on Friday.
The other half will go to “support humanitarian relief and begin the process of bringing refugees to the United States.”
Murphy praised his Senate colleagues for coming together across party lines to sign off on the spending bill. (The 2,700-page bill passed the Senate 68 to 31.)
“Americans are appreciating how you have to fight for democracy sometimes,” Murphy said. “I’m glad that this country has decided to step up and support Ukraine.”
How have his thoughts on Russia’s invasion changed over the past two weeks?
“I am pleasantly surprised at how well the Ukrainians have fought,” he said. And he’s “a little surprised at how incompetent the Russians have been at stages of this fight. I think the fight for Kyiv is going to be long and bloody.”
“I’m not shocked at the brutality of Vladimir Putin,” he continued. Anyone who watched Russia’s previous invasion of Chechnya and support of Syria “saw he has absolutely no reservations about targeting civilians, absolutely no reservations about bombing hospitals and kindergartens,” Murphy observed.
“This is a brutal, inhumane, wicked person, and the world is now seeing that very clearly.”
He said that the U.S. and its allies need to bring Putin “to his knees” through sanctions and rescue as many Ukrainians as they can.
How could, how should, this war end?
“The end is up to Vladimir Putin,” Murphy said. “There is no good ending for him.”
“If he decides to enter Kyiv,” Murphy continued, “he is going to have a decades-long insurgency on his hands. The Ukrainian people are not going to stop fighting. He’s going to have to have hundreds of thousands of troops inside Ukraine for the next 50 years in order to control that country. He can’t afford that.
“My hope is that Putin is going to look for an off-ramp. And we should be willing to give him that off-ramp. But that off-ramp doesn’t allow him to control Ukraine. That off-ramp doesn’t dictate the terms of who’s in or not in NATO. There’s certainly discussions we can have with Putin about our force posture in Eastern Europe, for instance.
“But there are certain things we’re never going to give up on. One of them is democracy and the sovereignty of Ukraine.”
Putin's off-ramp: Formal recognition of Russian Crimea, an "independent" or Russian controlled Donbas region, and a new government in Kyiv that won't dream of NATO, the EU, or western/liberal democracy. He doesn't want to, nor is he able to, conquer and occupy what's left of Ukraine after that. He will destroy Ukraine and bring it to its knees eventually, like he did in Chechnya 22 years ago.
Will he find a Ukrainian Kadyrov? Will there be a prolonged insurgency in eastern Ukraine? Is the influx of western arms only prolonging the invitable and the suffering? Will the west really stand by Ukraine when Putin turns it up a couple of notches?