On the recordMarch 23, 2015
I thank the gentlelady for yielding. Mr. Speaker, as my good friend Eliot Engel from New York explained, last April, we took a delegation to Ukraine, not just to the western part of the country, but, most importantly, we went to the east. We went to Dnipropetrovs'k. We went as far east as we could go, up against the border there of Donets'k and Luhans'k. We had an opportunity to have a dialogue with the Ukrainian people. We reached out to civil society. We set up meetings with women's groups and lawyers' groups. And across the spectrum in eastern Ukraine, speaking to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, we got, I believe, a good idea of what was on their minds--I think there were about eight members of our delegation--and they were sharing with us these words: What Putin is doing, what the Russians are doing right now is going out on the Internet and recruiting every skinhead and malcontent in the Russian-speaking region that they can find. And then they train these young men, and then they send them over the border to create mayhem. And what we are trying to do here--this was the explanation from the Ukrainians--we are trying to catch them. They speak with a different accent than we do, so we can catch them, and we try to hold them until this war is over. But increasingly, we find that what is happening is that the Russians are sending their own troops over. They are sending their own armor. They are sending over military equipment that we cannot defend against.…
