“I strongly disagree with this proposal,” Blinken said during a congressional hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in response to Paul’s assertion that “you can say” that the countries Russia is attacking are part of The Soviet Union. Paul seems to have indicated that Russia’s anger over Ukraine’s eventual accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – especially given that it had previously been in the Soviet Union – could have provoked the invasion.
He was pushed back and forth by Paul, who asked why the United States “agitated” Ukraine to join NATO last fall, which Russia vehemently opposed as a “red line.”
Blinken says it is important to continue to defend NATO’s open door policy.
“The right of these countries is to decide their own future and their own destiny,” Blinken said, adding that their history did not give Russia the right to attack them.
“Nobody says it is,” Paul said.
“They were liberated as part of this empire by force,” Blinken said.
Blinken also said the United States sought to engage Russia with many of its concerns about Ukraine before invading Ukraine, but those efforts were unsuccessful because Russia was not genuinely interested.
“When it comes to the top, it is clear, in President Putin’s own words, that Ukraine has never been a potential part of NATO and it has always been his belief that Ukraine does not deserve to be a sovereign, independent country. that it must be resumed in Russia in one form or another, “Blinken said.
The GOP senator said: “There is no excuse for the invasion”, but “there are reasons for the invasion”.
Blinken’s remarks on Capitol Hill followed a trip abroad by the US Secretary of State with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, where Biden’s two cabinet officials met with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in Kyiv. During the trip, Blinken told reporters that Russia’s attempts to “conquer Ukraine and take its independence” had “failed.”
“Russia’s main goal is to completely subjugate Ukraine, to take away its sovereignty, to take away its independence – this has failed,” Blinken told a news conference in Poland near the Ukrainian border after meeting with Zelensky. “He tried to establish the power of his army and his economy. We, of course, see the exact opposite, an army that is drastically weaker and an economy … as a result of sanctions that is in ruins. “
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