One of President Trump’s staunchest foreign policy allies in Congress wants him to reverse the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“I would hope that our president removes those sanctions and tells President Putin that we’re going to start all over again,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s not going to call it a reset, because that’s become a cliche, but we’re going to take away these sanctions and build a whole new relationship which facilitates working together to attain mutually-beneficial goals — rather than the current policy, which is unending hostility and belligerence toward Russia, no matter what it does.”
Rohrabacher has a good relationship with Trump; he was in the running for an appointment in the State Department as Trump conducted his search for secretary of state. Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, a phone conversation that has sparked concern in Congress and international foreign policy circles that Trump will reverse the Ukraine sanctions. Rohrabacher has a proposal, which he avoided saying if he has shared with Trump, for lifting the sanctions without totally conceding to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
He wants Trump to reverse the sanctions in exchange for Russia withdrawing from eastern Ukraine, though not Crimea, a Ukrainian region which Russia annexed in 2014. At the same time, Rohrabacher said the Ukrainian government should agree to an internationally monitored referendum in which the people of Crimea vote on whether they want to be part of Ukraine or Russia. “Anybody who knows the area knows that these people are pro-Russian, they are Russians, they consider themselves Russians, they speak Russian,” he said.
That proposal is analogous to the oft-broken ceasefire pact known as the Minsk Agreement, although it goes farther than the Minsk talks by conceding that Crimea — which was taken in “the first gunpoint land grab in Europe since the end of World War II,” as former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it — can leave Ukraine. The sanctions were imposed in order to use economic pressure to force Russia to withdraw from all the territory its military has taken. Putin mobilized his military in support of embattled President Victor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian leader who faced protests after withdrawing Ukraine from an economic agreement with the European Union.
“We would hope that President Trump heeds the advice of his international allies and continues to hold Russia accountable for its actions and forces it to come to the table to negotiate a peaceful resolution to a war the Russian leaders unnecessarily provoked,” Rasmussen said Friday.
Rohrabacher, who emphasized that he doesn’t believe that “Putin’s a good guy,” disagreed with that assessment.
“I don’t believe Putin started this,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I believe the West started it when they overthrew a pro-Russian democratically-elected government that was on Russia’s border.” He added that Yanukovych should have been removed from power at the regularly schedule election. “I am so upset that we didn’t just do that because I would have been right there saying ‘kick Yanukovych out, what a corrupt son of a bitch,'” Rohrabacher said.
Yanukovych was impeached and removed by Ukraine’s parliament after protests against his administration devolved into a shootout between protesters and security forces. “I was against any use of force, let alone the use of firearms, I was against bloodshed,” the former president told the BBC in 2015. “But the members of the security forces fulfilled their duties according to existing laws. They had the right to use weapons.”
Rohrabacher acknowledges that his view is out of step with the majority of American foreign policy leaders and experts, who agree that Putin moved into Ukraine as part of his long-term plan to reassemble the old Soviet empire.
“Each of our last three presidents had high hopes for building a partnership with the Russian government,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Friday. “Each attempt failed, not for lack of good faith and effort on the U.S. side, but because Putin wants to be our enemy. He needs us as his enemy. He will never be our partner, including in fighting [the Islamic State]. He believes that strengthening Russia means weakening America.”
McCain promised to try to “codify sanctions against Russia into law,” but Rohrabacher said he is at risk of “building a reality” in which the United States and Russia are permanent adversaries. He believes Trump will have the advantage in any political fight over sanctions with Congress.
“I am aware that my opinion does not reflect that of a significant number of my colleagues in the House and Senate,” he said. “I do know it reflects a huge chunk of the American people and a huge chunk of Republicans out there. They want to work with Russia, they want to work with anybody. And they have no trouble seeing who our primary enemy is, which is radical Islam.”
