Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Victoria Spartz became the first U.S. lawmakers to travel to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24 when they spent two days there about two weeks ago.
The Republican senator from Montana was in Slovakia meeting with government officials when Ukrainian leaders extended an invitation for him to visit Kyiv, the country’s capital, and Bucha, a suburb located on the outskirts of town where there have been reports of alleged war crimes, including mass graves and executed civilians.
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Daines accepted the invitation because “they want Americans, and the world, to know about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s atrocities against innocent people of Ukraine [that] are happening now, and not after time has passed, in the aftermath of the evil and bloodshed,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview on Tuesday.
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“I thought the absence of any American official in Ukraine since Feb. 24 was conspicuous,” he explained, though both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled there earlier this week. “It was time for an American to be there, and when they invited me to come, I said I would do it, and I was proud to show that Americans stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom.”
Daines stood alongside Ukrainian officers as they exhumed bodies from the “shallow graves” that were “filled with civilians, women, children,” while “the stench of death was still very much apparent. At one moment, I had to put my hand and my jacket over my nose because it was awful.”
“When I was there, Mike, I saw things that I would wish nobody would ever have to see in their lifetime,” the senator added. “I stood literally on the edge of the shallow graves that were full of innocent, murdered Ukrainians. It was indisputable — the evidence is related to war crimes being committed.”
Russia sought at the beginning of its offensive to move troops from Belarus, which borders Ukraine from the north, quickly to Kyiv, where they would be able to topple the government, but it did not work out. The Russians faced insurmountable resistance from Ukrainian forces, in addition to a series of self-inflicted problems such as an ineffective resupply support and poor morale. Russian forces occupied various towns outside the capital, such as in Bucha, where they stayed before ultimately retreating.
Upon the Russian retreat from the areas surrounding the capital, the crimes the Kremlin’s troops allegedly committed in those towns became known.
While Daines was at one of the mass graves where forensic investigators were exhuming bodies, a Ukrainian police officer showed him a booklet found nearby that had personal information of Russian soldiers.
“One of the Russian soldiers accidentally left behind these little booklets, and I asked the police officers to interpret what information is contained in these booklets, and he started flipping through a page by page, they had the name of every one of those soldiers in that particular unit, their date of birth, their legal name, and then it has the names of their parents.”
Ukrainian officials are using the U.S.-based Clearview AI software to identify captured or dead Russian soldiers, the total number of which is unknown, but U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said on Monday that the number of killed in action is roughly 15,000.
Daines, who has four children and three grandchildren, visited residential complexes that had been destroyed and found a child’s toy. He added, “These were some small children that one day were playing with friends or with their mothers or grandmothers, and the next moment, they were killed by the Russians.”
Following the senator’s return to the U.S., he and Spartz wrote a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to send members of his administration to Ukraine and to restart U.S. diplomatic efforts in Kyiv. Since that letter was sent, Austin and Blinken traveled to the capital to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Blinken said the State Department would restart its embassy reopening efforts shortly.
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Biden tapped Bridget Brink, a career senior foreign service member and the ambassador to Slovakia, to be the ambassador to Ukraine as a part of plans to reopen the embassy in Kyiv. Brink met with Daines during his time in Slovakia, and he praised her nomination, saying, “She’s the right person for the job, and she wants to see through her bold leadership, the embassy reopened in Kyiv.”
While the Montana senator praised the Biden administration’s recent acts, including providing $1.5 billion in military aid since Russia shifted its focus away from the capital and to the east, he was more critical of the early parts of the war and the administration’s actions in the time leading up to it, mainly referencing energy dependence.
