Sen. Angus King (I-ME) said during a press conference on Monday that America should continue to support Ukraine until Russia’s Vladimir “Putin is out.”
One person asked King, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, how long the United States should continue to support Ukraine as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia will soon pass its one-year anniversary.
King just returned from a trip to Ukraine, where he and Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), another Senate Armed Services Committee, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last Friday.
“I believe we should remain there until Putin is out,” King said, although it remains unclear if he means until Russia is out of Ukrainian territory or until Putin is out of power.
The Maine senator referred to the conflict in Ukraine as “our fight” because he said history allegedly suggests that Putin would not stop at Ukraine. He proceeded to compare Putin’s conflict with Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s actions before World War Two.
“I don’t see this as a long, 20-year struggle which we saw in Afghanistan. Here we have a strong government, a strong armed services that are fighting on their own with our help,” King added.
He continued, “But protecting democracy, freedom and confronting authoritarianism as President Zelensky said in his address to Congress, isn’t charity. It’s an investment.”
King said that increasing Republican skepticism towards providing more aid to Ukraine is not in the “mainstream” of the GOP:
I don’t think that the mainstream of the Republican party in the House is sharing these sentiments, but it is concerning. And I think we have to continue to remind people how important it is and that this is not some far-away conflict that doesn’t involve us. That’s the same attitude that was in this country in the late-1930s. And because of lack of response to Hitler in the west between 1936 and 1939, we ended up with World War II and 55 million people killed. So this is a place where we can stop this.
The U.S. has provided $113 billion in aid to Ukraine since the dawn of the conflict; this figure eclipses the annual budget of every country in the world except the U.S. and China.
King said that Zelensky’s “courage, determination, and grit” reminded him of Joshua Chamberlain, a former Maine governor and Civil War hero.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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