A slew of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle took issue with the Biden administration’s claim that Russian troops entering disputed Ukrainian territory does not amount to an invasion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday officially recognized two occupied regions — the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic — as independent of Ukraine, and he ordered troops to enter those regions. A U.S. official reacted by saying the United States doesn’t consider this a “new step,” because Russian troops have been there since 2014.
“To be clear, if any additional Russian troops or proxy forces cross into Donbas, the Biden administration and our European allies must not hesitate in imposing crushing sanctions,” Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “There must be tangible, far-reaching and substantial costs for Russia in response to this unjustified act.”
RUSSIA FORMALLY RECOGNIZES TWO SEPARATIST REGIONS IN EASTERN UKRAINE, PAVING WAY FOR INVASION
President Joe Biden issued an executive order in response that prevents new investments in the regions, stops the U.S. import and export of goods to and from the regions, and asserts the authority to impose sanctions on specific individuals, according to a White House fact sheet.
The sanctions are not the same ones the administration has warned Russia about previously, because “Russian troops moving into Donbas by itself would not be a new step,” a senior administration official told reporters on Monday evening. However, White House principal deputy national security adviser Jon Finer said Tuesday morning that Putin’s actions mark “the beginning of an invasion.”
Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a longtime Biden ally on Capitol Hill, said in his own statement that “the time for taking action to impose significant costs on President Putin and the Kremlin starts now.”
Some Republicans also pressed for a more significant response following Putin’s latest move.
House Armed Services Committee ranking Republican Mike Rogers and House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking Republican Michael McCaul called the new sanctions “the definition of impotence” and said it’s “time for President Biden to impose sanctions that strike at the heart of the Russian economy.”
The administration’s current stance appears to contradict previous comments from officials. Last month, Biden suggested that a “minor incursion” wouldn’t result in the same response from the U.S. as a full-scale one, though the administration later tried to clean up the remark.
“If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement shortly after, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken said days later that if “a single additional Russian force goes into Ukraine in an aggressive way, that would trigger a swift, a severe, and a united response from us and from Europe.”
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Sen. Lindsey Graham compared the situation to a poker hand, saying the “Russians have a pair of twos, while the West has a full house. However, it is the West that is folding.”
For weeks ahead of Putin’s recognition of the occupied territories, lawmakers attempted to pass a bipartisan bill focused on sanctioning Russia should an invasion occur. The bipartisan talks came to a halt when there was a disagreement over whether the sanctions should be imposed preemptively or done in a reactionary manner.
