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Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The Ingraham Angle to discuss the latest on Ukraine. See below for highlights and watch the full interview here.
On Putin’s placement of Russian nuclear forces:
“I don’t think there’s any reason to panic … that we are on the verge of a nuclear exchange of ICBMs. But I do think it bears watching.
“This is my personal view…. This is not the same Putin as [the Putin of] five or 10 years ago. This is a guy whose entire legitimacy in Russia is built on his argument that the ’90s were an era of humiliation, he restored Russia to great global power status, and now he’s facing the freefall of his economy. What is facing Russia’s economy over the next 10 days is cataclysmic. And then you add to that the humiliation on the battlefield they have faced so far, even though they’re keeping much of that from the Russian public.
“You see a guy who’s facing some circumstances that he needs to reverse pretty quickly. He needs to reestablish some level of power balance with the West before he can even think about what else to do. He doesn’t have a lot of tools to do it except cyber, maybe some space warfare, ratcheting up whatever monstrosity he will commit in Ukraine, and tactical battlefield nuclear weapons.
“It is part of Russia’s doctrine to escalate in order to de-escalate by using tactical nuclear weapons. I’m not arguing they are on the verge of doing that. I’m just saying that with a guy in that condition with that mindset in charge, you will get a different decision from him today than you would have 10 years ago. And it’s just something we need to keep an eye on.”
On how the Chinese Communist Party enabled the Russian invasion:
“[Putin] never would have done this had he not felt that China would to some extent be there to help buffer … the pain of it, there’s no doubt about it. In fact, he moved a bunch of troops from the far east of Russia. [That is] something [the Russians have] never done before, because as you know, China claims Siberia belongs to them, so there’s always been a strong Russian military presence there. [Putin] pulled a lot of that towards Belarus….
On Russia’s endgame in Ukraine:
“Nobody knows what happens here next but some things have become pretty obvious, and you can see it from the commercial imagery…. A mass of Russian forces is pushing in from the north. They will try to take the western part of Kyiv…. All of these supplies we keep talking about, everything that we are providing and other countries are providing, it has to come over from the west. So if they can cut Kyiv off of those supplies, it begins to really deteriorate the city’s standing.
“And then obviously you have these other two forces that are pushing in from the northeast. Eventually they’ll try to take the east. Once they have got Kyiv encircled, I think you will see a medieval-type siege. That means people starving. [The Russians are] hoping the government will collapse or surrender eventually, and then they can install some sort of puppet government, which has been [Putin’s] goal the whole time….
“The Ukrainians have fought a lot harder and more effectively than we anticipated. Their spirits are very high. So they still have a chance to disrupt this. But this is what [the Russians] are planning to do. As you have seen from the imagery…, what they’re bringing down from the north is a massive, massive show of force.
On the Democrats’ attempt to incorporate Ukraine funding into an appropriations package:
“In an ideal world, we do have an appropriations bill for the year, because what that allows you to do is programming. It allows you to spend money on things you’ve authorized [the government and its contractors] to build. For example, how are we going to counter hypersonics and things of that nature? You need programmatic money to do that. That is true.
“That said, that is not an impediment [to funding Ukraine]. Today, instead of voting on this abortion on demand bill that [the Democrats] put up on the floor, we could be moving right now for some supplemental funding, if they want to provide more weapons to the Ukrainian fighters. In fact, the President has the authority to provide quite a bit of that now. The fact of the matter is, we are not doing it because they didn’t bring it to the floor.
“If [the Democrats] wanted to [help Ukraine], they could do that. I think you’d find a lot of support in Congress for spending that involves things like providing more of the things you are seeing on television, the things that blow up tanks, the munitions that bring down airplanes and provide some air cover[, to Ukraine]. So yes, it is ideal to have an appropriations bill, everybody would agree. But that’s not an impediment to doing what we need to do.”
On the long-term threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party:
“This is an acute problem we are facing right now [in Ukraine] and a very serious one. But the long-term problem, the hundred year problem, the fifty-year problem, is China. All these sanctions you’ve seen imposed on Russia, there’s no way you could ever get anyone to impose those on China. Their economy at this point [is] too big and too deeply ingrained in all of these countries, including our own.
“There’s a lot of the things that we need to use, both in our technology and everyday life, that we can’t possibly use [without importing it] because it’s made in China. They control the means of production. The supply chain issue is the single greatest vulnerability this country faces. It was exposed by COVID, [and] it will really be exposed in the future with some conflict.
“Russia cannot impose economic pain on America, but China could because of how deeply ingrained our corporate class has become in the Chinese model and the Chinese economy. In fact, they become lobbyists for the Chinese position on a lot of issues. [The Chinese] deputize our corporation to come up here and lobby Congress for China’s interests. [This happens] because [companies] are making money in [China] because the factories are over there. We have to pull back from that or we are going to find ourselves 50 times more vulnerable to China than we ever have been to Russia.”