Senator Says US Should Remain in Ukraine Until ‘Putin Is Out’
Senator Angus King said the US should not put a timetable on support for Ukraine and remain involved in the war until “Putin is out.” Maine’s Senator claimed that stopping Russia now was equivalent to the missed opportunity allies had to stop the rise of Nazi Germany. He suggested the US was not giving Ukraine enough support.
During a virtual press conference, King was asked, “how long should we remain [in Ukraine]?” The Senator said the White House should not put a timeline on support for Kiev, adding, “I believe we should remain there until Putin is out.”
It is unclear if King means until Putin is out of power or once Russian troops have left all Ukrainian-claimed territory. Kiev’s and Moscow’s territorial demands violate each other’s redlines. King acknowledged the current conflict is a stalemate but asserted he did not believe this would be a “20-year struggle” like Afghanistan.
Throughout the virtual presser, King referenced a historical need to win the war against Russia. He did not address the potential of escalation to nuclear war between Moscow and Washington.
The Senator alluded to the questions raised by his constituents about curbing support for Ukraine in his introduction. “I get letters every now and then, people saying, ‘Why are we doing this? Ukraine’s far away. It’s not our fight.’ Well, it is our fight, because if we don’t fight it now, it will spread,” King said. “And it will become something that we can’t avoid being involved in, just as occurred in the late 1930s at the beginning of World War II.”
Throughout the presser, the Senator claimed if Putin was not stopped in Ukraine, he would go on to conquer more of Europe, comparing the Russian leader to Adolf Hitler several times.
King additionally suggested the US could give more aid to Ukraine, noting some allies are giving more in terms of GDP. “If you measure it in terms of GDP, we’re between fifth and tenth in the world, and other countries are contributing actually larger shares of their GDP to the defense of Ukraine.” He continued, “Why? Because they recognized as hopefully, we will continue to recognize that this is really a fight for Western values.”
So far, Congress has authorized the White House to spend nearly $120 billion to support Kiev’s war effort. King claimed the American tax dollars are being well spent. “The software that they’re using working with Deloitte and sap to track everything coming in every spare part every dollar,” he asserted.
However, CNN has reported the arms America sends to Ukraine quickly fall into a “black hole.” In October, Finland’s national law enforcement agency warned that weapons being shipped to Ukraine are ending up in the hands of criminal gangs. In November, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned, “the situation in the Sahel and the raging war in Ukraine serve as major sources of weapons and fighters that bolster the ranks of the terrorists in the Lake Chad Region.”
The Senator gave the press conference after traveling to Ukraine last week. King said meeting Zelensky was “thrilling” and described Ukraine’s president as one of “the great leaders of the century.”
While King claimed Zelensky and Ukraine are champions of democracy, Kiev has continued its transformation into an authoritarian state during his rule, some analysts argue. Ted Galen Carpenter wrote in The American Conservative, “[g]enuine democracies do not ban multiple opposition parties or close opposition media outlets. Nor do they rigorously censor (and put under strict government control) media outlets that they allow to remain open. Genuine democracies do not outlaw churches that advocate policies the government dislikes.” He added, “[y]et the Ukrainian government has committed not just one or two, but all of those abuses.”