Former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday suggested President Trump’s refusal to blame Russia as the sole aggressor who provoked the war in Ukraine “reflects a gross misunderstanding of the nature of negotiations and leverage.”
McConnell declared in a statement marking the three-year anniversary of the war that the “human catastrophe rests solely on Vladimir Putin” and that if Ukrainian forces laid down their arms, “Putin’s aims would not stop with Kyiv.”
“Mistaking this fact is as embarrassing as it is costly,” McConnell said.
He also criticized what he called the Biden administration’s “shameful hesitation and half-measures” in responding to Russian aggression but, without naming Trump specifically, he warned that refusing to recognize the United States’s interest in defeating Russian aggression would be “even more disgraceful.”
“Refusing to acknowledge Russia as the undeniable and unprovoked aggressor is more than an unseemly moral equivalency — it reflects a gross misunderstanding of the nature of negotiations and leverage,” he said.
McConnell, the chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, issued his statement a few days after Trump suggested that Ukraine started the war with Russia and called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator without elections.”
Russia’s army invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, after Putin said he needed to protect the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and contain NATO expansion.
Trump refused to call Putin a “dictator” when asked by a reporter whether he would use the same words for the Russian president.
“I don’t use those words lightly,” Trump responded during a joint press appearance with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday at the White House.
Trump and Macron discussed their efforts to bring an end to the three-year war.
Those comments came on the same day the United States voted against a U.N. resolution condemning Russia as the aggressor in the war, joining Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Israel and Hungary in voting no.
McConnell, who has devoted his final two years in the Senate to pushing back against the isolationists in his party, said that hoping that “appeasement will check the ambitions” of Putin is “as naïve today as it was in 1939,” referring to Western Europe’s initial hesitancy in standing up to Nazi Germany.
“America is right to seek an end to this war, but an end that fails to constrain Russian ambition, ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, or strengthen American credibility with both allies and adversaries is no end at all,” he warned.
“Instead, such a hollow peace would invite further aggression,” he said.
McConnell said the “axis of aggressors from Beijing to Moscow,” which includes Iran and North Korea, is seeking an outcome in Ukraine that “undermines the credibility of American deterrence and leaves U.S. interests more vulnerable.”
“Without a clear and resolute commitment to the leadership and order that underpins our prosperity and security, America’s adversaries will receive exactly what they hope for,” he declared.
