WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, yesterday joined CNN’s Pamela Brown to share insights from his recent congressional delegation trip to Europe and the Ukrainian border. Blunt also spoke about the impact of the war on China’s future territorial ambitions.
CLICK HERE to Watch Blunt’s Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehoBVaT8kpw
Following is a transcript:
BLUNT: Well, I think we need to be sure that we’re sending the right thing. And it’s getting there. It’s getting there in the right way. You know, there’s some concern that the Ukrainian system of supply is still a little too Soviet in nature. You know, the Soviet system was everything took a lot of time, and it took a lot of people because that was kind of how the Soviet Union worked. And helping them streamline what they do with these weapons when they get them and being sure that we’re getting the right thing to the right place at the right time here, it becomes really important. And I think we’re moving in that direction more. At first, it seemed to me that we were being driven by events more than we’re driving events. But we may be to a moment now where President Biden and the Congress are in unity and driving events. You know, on the trip I was on—Steny Hoyer, the Majority Leader in the House, put that trip together. He and I were whips together for about a decade. And we talked every day. And we’ve always had a great relationship. But there were—on that trip, there were five Democrats and four Republicans. In any discussion on this topic, the people who we were talking to, whether they were from other NATO countries or from Ukraine or from Poland, couldn’t have told, I don’t think, who the Republicans were and who the Democrats were. There’s a moment here, both in our country and maybe even more importantly in Europe, where everybody is back on the same page. And I think for several years, there were real, serious reasons to doubt whether our NATO allies were fully committed to the principles of NATO or not. And at least for now and hopefully any foreseeable future, they are fully committed.
BROWN: I’m curious what you think the long term prognosis is for Ukraine, also for the U.S., and whether in the short term, you see the U.S. getting involved or NATO countries getting involved in implementing an embargo around the waters there, the Black Sea, given what we see Russia’s strategy being?
BLUNT: Well, clearly, the current Russian strategy is to try to take over the entire southern part of the country and maybe link up with Moldova, which then puts Moldova also at jeopardy. But the big economic impact of that is you really take away the ports that Ukraine has. You know, Ukraine has a significant amount of the food exports in the entire world. And you eliminate the water capacity to get that done, you’ve changed that economy pretty dramatically. That’d be a mistake for us to let that happen. And there should be dramatic penalties on Russia if it does happen.
BROWN: So does that mean that you think there should be an embargo on those waters, which is, for our viewers, similar to essentially a no fly zone, right? But, but on the waters.
BLUNT: Well, the embargo is more of an economic impact. And I think we’d have to figure out exactly what that meant and how to do it. How do you enforce an embargo there? But there certainly should be significant economic penalties on anything that comes out of ports or land that’s been seized in the aggressive and brutal way that the Russians are doing this. This is something I think with—after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I think we had about 20 years where nobody ever anticipated that, certainly in Europe, that you’d have a country so aggressively, so brutally, so publicly doing what Russia is doing right now. And I think there are war crimes involved. And, you know, in the court of public opinion, I think Putin is already guilty. But people are right now gathering the information they need to keep track of people that were brutalized, people who were shot in the back of their head with their hands tied behind their backs, and the 1000s of innocent victims where you bombed schools and hospitals and residential apartment complexes. It’s totally unacceptable. And Putin is going to come out of this, even if he’s a victor, as a pariah, I think, to the other countries that Russia needs to deal with and surely would like to deal with.
BROWN: Do you think he will be a victor? Do you think he will be able to lock in?
BLUNT: You know, I think the Ukrainians have a real chance to win here. They’ve shown a real desire to win. The three big surprises, I think, of the war had been how the Ukrainians have fought back, how poorly the Russians have performed, and really how the European countries have rallied around NATO and how we’ve expressed again, our real commitment to NATO. And I think that says a lot about what can happen. And if Putin wins, Europe will be a different place for a generation than if Ukraine wins. And we should see that Ukraine wins.
BROWN: I want to ask you about Putin’s state of mind because you sit on the Intelligence Committee and I know that it has been looking for clues as to his state of mind, how he’s viewing this conflict. Based on what you know, do you think that Putin believes he is winning? And has the committee been given any insight into the reported detentions of senior FSB officials in Russia?
BLUNT: Well, I think that’s important. Putin surely this did not turn out the way he thought it would. He’s—no matter how detached he is from reality, if he is, he can’t help but see that this is a big negative for his leadership and for Russia. And the Russian people may not know it, but the rest of the world does. So he’s really got a couple of choices here. One is to blame the intelligence community, and the second is to blame the military. And right now, he seems to be saying, ‘look, we weren’t told everything we needed to know about what would happen, and you’re going to pay a price for that.’ And I’m not sure even Putin can take on very many of these strong entities in his own country and hope to continue to lead. But we’ll see. You know, he’s been brutally in charge for 20 years. He’s increasingly isolated. Those pictures we see of him setting 30 feet away from everybody he’s talking to, I think, are an indication of his state of mind and maybe his detachment from the connectedness that most leaders in democratic countries have to have. But certainly under, under Putin, Russia is not a democratic country.
BROWN: Very quickly, given what you just laid out there about the threat of Russia, why do you see China as the biggest challenge facing the U.S.?
BLUNT: Well, China is just more capable. They have—you know, Russia without Ukraine is a middle rate power at best. If you add Ukraine to Russia, suddenly you’ve got this great agricultural capacity as well as all the minerals and things that Russia has, but China has the capacity and the money. But I think China runs the risk here of joining Russia and Putin on the list of pariah states if they want to continue to go in lockstep with Putin. And they need to be paying close attention to what Ukrainians have done and will do even if Putin gets some sort of temporary control as they think about what they might do with Taiwan.