On the recordFebruary 8, 2024
I am very pleased to be here this afternoon with the Senator from New Hampshire and the Senator from Maryland to talk about our commitments in Europe, our commitments to Ukraine. I want to thank them for their leadership on the Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee here in the Senate. They are a team that I wouldn't want to tangle with. And I am glad they are out here on the floor today as allies in support of this incredibly important mission. I am also very glad that after 4 months of an endless--almost seemed endless--and painful set of negotiations, we find ourselves in a place where we have actually had a sign of bipartisan cooperation to fulfill our obligations at this really, really critical moment just in the nick of time. And I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for that strong vote. And I hope as we go forward in the coming hours that that is a bill that we will actually build on because there are some people who are saying this will never pass the House of Representatives. It never will unless we can figure out how to pass it here. And we can do it in a bipartisan way. And we are off to that start. When Russia invaded Ukraine just 2 years ago, the world expected Kyiv would fall in 72 hours; that Putin would depose Ukraine's government and that he would install a puppet government in that capital city. But the Ukrainian people astonished the world.…
