“I strongly disagree with that assertion,” Blinken said during a congressional hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in response to Paul’s claim that “one could argue” that the countries that Russia attacked were part of the Soviet Union was. Paul seemed to imply that Russia’s anger at Ukraine’s possible entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — especially given that it was formerly in the Soviet Union — may have sparked the invasion.
The back-and-forth was sparked by Paul’s question as to why the US “acted” last fall for Ukraine to join NATO, which Russia vehemently denied as a “red line.”
Blinken argued that it was important to continually defend NATO’s open-door policy.
“It is the right of these countries to decide their future and their own destiny,” Blinken continues, saying their history does not give Russia the right to attack them.
“No one says it is,” Paul replied.
“They were forcibly liberated as part of this empire,” Blinken said.
Blinken also said that the US tried to engage Russia before invading Ukraine because of many of its concerns about Ukraine, but those efforts came to nothing because Russia wasn’t really interested.
“As things came to a head, it was abundantly clear, in President Putin’s own words, that the issue was never that Ukraine could potentially be part of NATO and that it was always about his belief that Ukraine does not deserve to be a sovereign, to be an independent country, that in one form or another it has to be reintroduced into Russia,” said Blinken.
The GOP senator said, “There is no justification for the invasion,” but “there are reasons for the invasion.”
Blinken’s comments on Capitol Hill followed a foreign trip by the US Secretary of State with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, during which the two Biden cabinet officials met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. On that trip, Blinken told reporters that Russia was trying to “subjugate Ukraine.” and take its independence” have “failed”.
“Russia tried as the main goal to completely subjugate Ukraine, to deprive Ukraine of its sovereignty, to deprive it of its independence – it failed,” said Blinken at a press conference in Poland near the Ukrainian border after meeting Zelenskyy. “It has tried to assert the power of its military and its economy. We are, of course, seeing the exact opposite, a military that is dramatically underperforming and an economy that is in shambles… as a result of sanctions.”