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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, lots of pundits are trying to get into President Putin's head and looking for some so-called off-ramp. Now, I am not a pundit, and I do not pretend to be able to read Putin's mind. However, I do listen carefully to those closest to Russia who have better insights than the American pundits, academics, and foreign policy theorists.

I happen to be cochair of the Senate Baltic Freedom Caucus, so I interact regularly with Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians--three countries that in 1940 the Soviet Union absorbed into it, and then since about 1990, they have been independent of Russia. So you can see these countries are historically Western in every sense except geography, but they have had a long and often painful exposure to the Russian-Soviet-KGB way of thinking.

Our Baltic friends can help others in the West who cannot seem to fathom what is going through Putin's mind. The fact that we cannot understand Putin's mindset is because he doesn't think like modern Western leaders.

Now, this is important insight from my Baltic contacts. Putin is stuck in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now, you know I like history, so this is something that I can understand. Putin thinks like a czar expanding his empire. He regrets the collapse of the Soviet Union--not because of communist ideology but because it reconstituted the Russian empire.

In foreign policy, it is easy to assume other countries are just like us. Experts don't know what to make of an 18th-century imperialist.

Some observers have speculated that Putin has gone crazy because he does not seem to be acting rationally, but from the standpoint of someone who thinks Ukraine is not a real country, as Putin has said for decades, and who regrets the collapse of the ``evil empire,'' he is acting rationally.

Our Baltic allies have been warning the West that Putin is an aggressor since well before the current invasion of Ukraine, before the 2014 invasion of neutral Ukraine, before the disastrous Obama administration ``reset'' of relations with Russia, and before the 2008 invasion of Georgia.

The Baltics have often been dismissed as hysterical or Russophobic or at least exaggerating when they warn about Russia. Well, the world has awakened to the fact that the Baltics were right all along.

We should have armed Ukraine to the teeth years ago. Putin only understands strength.

What lessons should have been learned from Putin's pattern of aggression over the years? Putin only understands strength, and weakness is provocative.

During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, when the Hungarian people were protesting to break free of Soviet control, the Eisenhower administration in this country paid lipservice to the aspirations for freedom but was secretly obsessed with not provoking the Soviets.

Eisenhower's Secretary of State, Dulles, made his speech in Dallas, TX, where he said this:

The [United States] has no ulterior purpose in desiring the independence of the satellite countries. . . . We do not look upon these nations as potential military allies. So you can see the expansion of NATO today proves how wrong Dulles was at that time.

However, after the Dulles speech, he then cabled the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, instructing that this be brought to the attention of the highest Soviet authorities. Any wonder why Hungary wasn't freed at that time?

The Estonian historian and also its former Prime Minister, Mart Laar, maintains that this message from Dulles was interpreted by Moscow as a carte blanche to intervene and the Americans would not stand in the way. That is why he titled the relevant chapter in his book on the rise and fall of communism in the region ``The lost opportunity: 1956.''

So what do our Baltic friends advise right now in the face of Putin's threats to escalate if we supply Ukraine with fighter jets or other advanced weapons?

Believe it or not, their advice is to relax. In other words, don't overreact to Putin's threats.

We have a nuclear deterrent and Putin knows that. The more we show we are scared by his threats, the harder he will push. And we absolutely need to stop declaring what we will not do in regard to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That just seems to embolden Putin to push harder.

The failure to push back the previous Russian aggressions--and that is not just a Biden problem. That is a problem of both Republican and Democratic Presidents before. Also the failure to enforce previous redlines in Syria and the perception of weakness from the Afghanistan pullout debacle--those three things are at least part of the reason for what is going on in Ukraine.

I hope President Biden has picked up on this as well.

Now is the time to redouble our efforts to reinforce Ukraine. Putin appears to have accepted that he cannot conquer all of Ukraine, but he is very definitely repositioning his forces to take as big of a chunk of the country as he can.

Ukraine must win this war--on to victory. Anything short of a Ukraine victory is an invitation for further Russian aggression elsewhere and, who knows, maybe even encouraging China.

We have got to stop the finger-pointing. We have got to stop the excuses, and we have got to get Ukraine air defenses, drones, and anything else to shift the balance.

To date, the United States and our allies have supplied the heroic Ukrainian military with the kinds of weapons that have allowed them to hang on while their cities are shelled and civilians are massacred.

The battle for Kyiv may have been won, but the battle for the east is only going to intensify. Unless we tip the balance, this could go on for a long, long time.

We have seen how brutal the Russian occupation has been in just 1 month. Imagine months and months of this in eastern Ukraine.

I have a bill with my friend Senator Durbin to guarantee that the United States will backfill certain critical weapons transferred to Ukraine by our eastern flank of NATO allies. Many NATO countries have been very generous in handing over their weapons to Ukraine. This is leaving a security gap in those very countries. But they know that if Putin isn't stopped in Ukraine, then those countries are at greater risk. As Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas says, Putin cannot even think he has won or his appetite will only grow.

Some of our NATO allies also have air defense systems and drones that could make a big difference in Ukraine.

There are rumors of negotiations to supply items needed in Ukraine, provided there is agreement to acquire American replacements. My bill with Durbin would provide that assurance up front without the redtape that seems to be involved in almost everything we do to help Ukraine.

Putin has talked constantly about what he calls ``demilitarization and denazification'' as his justification for launching this brutal invasion of Ukraine. That phrase does not make much sense on its face, but, again, we have to keep in mind that Putin has an imperial mindset.

No military analyst looking at Ukraine and Russia could possibly think that Ukraine posed any military threat to Russia. The Russian military dwarfs the Ukrainian one in manpower as well as equipment. In fact, it is clear that Putin and his military leaders underestimated the fighting ability of the Ukrainians.

The same is frankly true of NATO's military power along Russia's borders. What Putin means by ``demilitarizing'' is to shrink Ukraine's military to the point that that country is indefensible. He wants Ukraine totally susceptible to Russian threats, meaning back within Russia's sphere of influence.

Now, what about the term ``denazification''? Ever since World War II, Soviet leaders routinely labeled those in the Soviet Republics who expressed a desire for independence that they were fascist or Nazi. It is pretty clear that Putin's initial goal was to eliminate Ukraine's current government, starting with President Zelenskyy. So despite being descended from Holocaust survivors, denazification starts, from Putin's point of view, by eliminating a Jewish President, Zelenskyy.

A recent article in a Russian state-run publication, RIA Novosti, confirmed that denazification means that the elected government must be eliminated as well as the Ukrainian military. But this article goes on to say:

However, in addition to the top, a significant part of the masses who are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty. They supported and indulged Nazi power. . . . Denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainianization.

This ought to be very chilling to all of us, especially in light of the massacre at Bucha that we saw on television this week and other Ukrainian cities.

That statement reminds me of this quote from Catherine the Great after she completed her takeover of an independent Ukrainian state just 10 years before our own Declaration of Independence:

Every effort should be made to eradicate them and their age from memory.

``Them'' meaning the Ukrainians.

Stalin killed millions of Ukrainians by intentionally starving them to death with the same goal in the early 1930s.

Now, you know that Putin has praised Stalin and is now imitating Stalin.

The U.N. Genocide Convention defines genocide to mean ``any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.''

That sure seems to fit with what we know about Putin and his occupation of Ukraine.

There is one last lesson that we can learn from our Baltic friends. Despite the murder and deportation to Siberia of masses of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians to suppress their national identity, there were 10 years of active guerilla warfare by bands of what they called Forest Brothers. In fact, resistance never really ended until the Baltic countries threw off Soviet rule.

I will leave you with the first few lines of the Ukrainian national anthem: The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished. Luck will still smile on us, brother-Ukrainians. Our enemies will die, as the dew does in the sunshine, And we, too, brothers, we'll live happily in our land.

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