Source: United States Senator for Nebraska Ben Sasse
U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, spoke out on the dire situation in Ukraine this morning.
Excerpts from the interviews below:
Morning Joe on MSNBC
“What we should do right now is first of all, the intelligence community did a good job of getting Intel out faster than they usually do to help deny Putin the pretextual cover for what he was going to try to do. Ukraine isn’t a threat to Russia, Putin’s a liar he lies all the time, but he usually gets away with it. And the US intelligence community helped thwart that this time, we need to keep that up and we need to get tactical, actionable intelligence to the Ukrainians on the ground so they can kill the Russian invaders.”
“NATO’s strategic plan will probably be written this summer or next fall. They’re not going to leave the word China out of it anymore because they understand that Chairman Xi is interested in Russia destabilizing the West.”
Video here.
CBS Mornings
“Let’s be clear: nobody’s talking about putting troops on the ground in Ukraine, but we need to be absolutely certain that Putin understands that we and all of our NATO allies stand together, and that we will arm the Ukrainians…”
“President Biden needs to send an emergency supplemental defense request to Congress now, and we need to be arming the Ukrainians. We need to be sharing actionable intelligence with the Ukrainian resistors and with their military so we can kill the invading Russians.”
Video here.
CNN Newsroom
“We should in addition to sanctioning him (Putin), we should have a massive information operation, he does lying all the time, we should do truth telling. The Russian people need to understand how much money Putin and his buddies have stolen from them. Our enemy here is not the Russian people, it’s the corruption at the top of that regime that is invading a peaceful neighbor. I mean, Putin is evil, and he has will and he has weapons, and there’s no freedom for the American people to believe if we can just look the other way and pretend that this isn’t happening. Appeasement never works with a jackass like Putin.”
“Xi wants to see the U.S. humiliated, he wants to see Europe destabilize, he wants to push and prod at what a cyber/hybrid war looks like and see whether or not the U.S. and the West have will, because he’s using Russia as a scout team offense for his plans to seize Taiwan, we need to demonstrate not only to Putin, but we need to demonstrate to Xi, that there’s stuff we believe in, and that right now that means putting our money where our mouth is and having President Biden send up an emergency defense supplemental so that we can adequately arm the Ukrainians.”
Video here.