Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that it was “remarkably naive” to not understand it is in the U.S. national interests to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Anchor Jake Tapper asked, “We learned yesterday, shifting topics to overseas, that Russia is planning to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. It’s yet another escalation of tensions with the west and tensions with Ukraine. Russia says it’s just doing what the US already does with countries in Europe. What’s your response to the Russian move?”
Warner said, “My response is twofold. Putin is a dangerous man. We’ve always known that. We’ve seen that the Russian offensive and in Bakhmut, a city in the eastern part of Ukraine, seems to have stalled out. I’m hopeful that the Ukrainian counter-offensive is going to be successful. I think it also drives home the point that any wannabe American political leader that refuses to acknowledge how dangerous Putin is or that somehow that if Putin is successful in Ukraine, that is against our national interest what that would do in terms of threatening the Baltic States, what do we do in terms of threatening Poland, what do we do in terms of giving President Xi more of a green light to potentially take action against Taiwan. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is a remarkably naive or not understanding the kind of geopolitical challenging times that we live in.”
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