Sunday, during an appearance on FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin for his action over the past several days, including his invasion of Ukraine.
The California Republican called Putin “dangerous,” noting that no country in the world had stood with Putin.
“Well, when you look at Putin, this man is reckless, evil and dangerous,” he said. “There’s two reasons why he could be doing this, one, because this war is not going well and he’s being painted into a corner, and he wants to be a stronger had to try to negotiate a way out. The second one is he’s unstable, that he will — he literally tried to have a nuclear weapon option going forward. At this moment in time, no country in the world should stand with Putin. Everyone should unite around the basis of what he just claimed to take in just the last hours.”
McCarthy insisted President Joe Biden and his administration have misjudged the situation on repeated occasions, including advising Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to leave the country.
“[N]ow that we find what Putin is trying to do through all of this is, he didn’t see deterrent,” McCarthy continued. “What President Biden should have done, he should have supplied the weapons that he talks about today to the Ukraine. I had this conversation with President Biden in advance, telling him, I do not believe that Putin is afraid of sanctions. He’s lived with them for years. He knows how to get around them. What he really needs is a deterrent. Think about if President Zelensky — how far that they are fighting. Think if they had half the weapons we’d left in Afghanistan. They would have paid for them. But Russia would have never entered. Russia would have been falling even today.
“Think if Zelensky would have taken President Biden’s advice of leaving the country,” he added. “It would have collapsed. He is a modern-day Winston Churchill. We do not need a Neville Chamberlain to appease some other dictator like Putin. That — we have watched through history how that was a mistake. This is a moment in time. Even America taking the option of supplying Ukraine with weapons is correct, but it’s harder to supply them today. We should have taken those actions sooner. And we should learn from this moment in time that we should speed up the sales of weapons to Taiwan for what the future looks at — what China’s looking at happening today as well.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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