Republican Senators ducked answering questions about Donald Trump’s claim that Ukraine should have surrendered to Russia and his attempt to blame the bloody conflict on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president spoke to Fox News host Sean Hannity this week and blamed Zelensky’s failure to preemptively capitulate to Russia invading Ukraine, even though Russian forces have occupied parts of the country since 2014.
“Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,” Trump told Hannity. “He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal.”
But Republican senators dodged commenting on Trump’s remarks about the war that began when Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked his neighbor.
“I hadn’t heard that,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming told The Independent. “I’m not exactly sure what he was–what you’re referring to.”
Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has been a splitting point between Trump and the more hawkish Republican Senate conference. Last year, Trump blew up a deal to swap additional provisions for border security in exchange for aid to Israel and Ukraine. Aid to Ukraine ultimately passed without additional border security spending.
Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in 2019 where he asked for Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, then his campaign opponent, in exchange for aid to Ukraine triggered Trump’s first impeachment, for which he was acquitted. During that impeachment trial, some Republicans peddled the idea that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.
Since then, many pro-Trump Republicans have shown hostility to supporting Ukraine.
West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a supporter of Ukraine, said she had not heard Trump’s remarks.
“Well, I didn’t watch him, or didn’t hear him, so you’re telling me something new,” she told The Independent. “I’m going to pass on reacting to that because I’d rather see what he actually said.”
Other Republicans chose to blame President Joe Biden.
“I don’t think with the feckless Biden policies, that a deal could have been made because I don’t think Russia believed that the West would actually continue to support Ukraine,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told The Independent.
“I think that’s a whole different scenario with President Trump, because I think, in some ways, I think Putin’s a little bit afraid of him and what he might do,” he said. “So I hope he can cut a deal anybody can.”
Cornyn’s fellow Texan Sen. Ted Cruz echoed the remarks.
“I didn’t see the interview, so I don’t know the exact comment, but I do think the principal cause of the Ukraine war was Joe Biden’s weakness and appeasement towards Russia,” he told The Independent. Cruz specifically faulted Biden for waiving sanctions on the Nordstream 2 Pipeline.
Cruz said that the war in Ukraine will end soon because Trump is back in office. Trump has told Putin to “make a deal” to end the war.
But Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a major supporter of Ukraine, criticized Trump’s remarks.
“I think highly of President Zelensky,” Collins told The Independent. “He did not start this war. President Putin started this war with an unprovoked, unjustified invasion.”
As chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins will be in charge of setting aside any potential future aid to Ukraine. The chairman of the subcommittee on defense spending is former majority leader Mitch McConnell, himself a major defender of Ukraine.
