Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will travel to Russia for Monday meetings with Russian lawmakers, an aide to the Kentucky Republican confirmed.
“Senator Rand Paul is a proponent of diplomacy and is supporting President Donald J. Trump in engaging around the world,” deputy chief of staff Sergio Gor told the Washington Examiner in an email. “He looks forward to his meetings.”
Paul is expected to meet with lawmakers from the both the upper and lower chambers of the Russian parliament and Sergey Kislyak, the former ambassador to the United States. He’ll be following a group of Republican senators who made a similar trip over the July 4 recess last month.
“The issues of Russian-American relations and the prospects of bilateral inter-parliamentary ties will be discussed,” Konstantin Kosachyov, the chairman of the Federation Council committee, told TASS, a state-run media outlet.
Those discussions could advance, or parallel, discussions about a “task force” that lawmakers floated during the previous trip to Moscow. The Russian side, if the past delegation is any guide, are likely to want Paul’s support in lifting U.S. travel bans on lawmakers.
“They would love individuals who are sanctioned to have those sanctions released so they can start traveling around again,” Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who chairs the Foreign Relations subcommittee for Europe, told the Washington Examiner following the trip.
But Johnson returned from Moscow with renewed interest in shifting the focus of U.S. sanctions precisely to such personal punishments. “My sense is that the targeted sanctions to the oligarchs, to the members of government, are the ones that really sting and probably [offer] the best chance of affecting their behavior,” he said. “The Russian people, they don’t care if an oligarch can’t buy a $10 million mansion in London.”
Kosachyov announced Paul’s trip on the same day that a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a new package of Russia sanctions in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
“The current sanctions regime has failed to deter Russia from meddling in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday. “The sanctions and other measures contained in this bill are the most hard-hitting ever imposed – and a direct result of Putin’s continued desire to undermine American democracy … These sanctions and other measures are designed to respond in the strongest possible fashion.”
Paul agrees that “in all likelihood” Russia interfered in the 2016 elections, but he has argued that outrage over that controversy has distracted from “the big picture” about the need for better relations with the Russian government.
“I think there’s a bit of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he told CNN after Trump’s Helsinki summit. “I think there are people who hate the president so much that this could have easily been President Obama early in the first administration, setting the reset button and trying to have better relations with Russia, and I think it’s lost on people that they’re a nuclear power … We have serious conflicts in various parts of the globe; it would be a mistake not to have open lines of communication with them.”
