Sen. Marco Rubio is still pretending he cares about getting aid to Ukraine. Rubio made an appearance on this weekend's Fox News Sunday and had this exchange with host Shannon Bream:
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sunday offered his prediction for how the Russia-Ukraine war could unfold, arguing neither side will “achieve victory as defined in the most idealistic terms.”
When asked by “Fox News Sunday” anchor Shannon Bream how much “pressure” the U.S. or other international leaders should put on Russia and Ukraine to find a solution, Rubio said, “I’m not going to set parameters on what that looks like. It’s not our place to do that; it’s premature to do that.”
“Here’s what I do know, there is no way that the Russia Federation takes Ukraine, all of Ukraine, half of Ukraine and that was [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s goal from the beginning was to carve it up into half… at least half the country, including Kyiv, that’s not going to happen,” Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, continued.
Rubio, however, said it is important to look at the “reality” of Ukraine’s size and ability in comparison to Russia.
“We have the reality of it is that Ukraine is small compared to Russia in terms of size and its ability to bring scale, its ability to force, conscript people… I’m just being honest,” he said. “You know, in the past, I have tried not to talk about this publicly because I thought it undermined the leverage that Ukraine had, but now it’s the reality.”
[...]
“Neither side is going to be able to achieve victory as defined in the most idealistic terms,” Rubio said. “So then the question becomes if in fact, there’s going to be a negotiated settlement, who’s going to have the leverage here? Is it going to be Putin or is it going to be Ukraine, and I want Ukraine to have the most amount of leverage possible when the time comes for those conversations to happen.”
Which was followed by Rubio basically demanding the exact thing he just helped to kill last month when Republicans blocked the bipartisan border package their own members helped to negotiate because Trump demanded it.
RUBIO: I believe that we should help Ukraine, but only after we help America through our border, in the same way as Democrats are saying we won't help Israel unless you help Ukraine, because they're holding Israel as leverage hostage over Ukraine. So, at the end of the day, that's what I hope we can achieve here.
It's not the same thing, and Rubio knows it. Democrats have been negotiating in good faith, unlike Republicans who are basically acting like Lucy with the football, and who admitted they didn't want to give Biden a "win" on the border even through they're constantly fearmongering and pretending that the situation at our border is an "emergency."
The truth of the matter is, the Republicans have become the party of Putin, and couldn't care less if they hand Ukraine over to him.
