Mr. President, 36 years ago, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate that separated East from West Berlin. He said to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Only a few years after his historic speech, the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing in decades--decades--of freedom and prosperity in Eastern Europe and a welcome end to the Cold War. Now there comes a man named ``Vladimir Putin'' who is clumsily and dangerously trying to regain that dystopian Soviet glory with a bloody war in Ukraine. So I can only wonder what President Reagan would be thinking now, with so many of his Republican Party Members refusing to support critical military assistance to keep Ukraine from falling to Russian tyranny. Yes, we have other legislative needs in Congress, but refusing to support the forces of freedom in Ukraine in a war against a resurgent evil empire in the name of partisanship is nothing short of reckless. It is not hard to understand how we got here. Putin gambled and lost a botched attempt to quickly overthrow Ukraine. Now he has to juggle a formidable Ukrainian resistance, huge losses of Russian conscript, isolation on the global stage, a struggling economy, domestic opposition, and an upcoming election in Russia that he needs to rig again to stay in power. Meanwhile, he has been branded a war criminal and has to carefully choose the nations that he visits so he isn't arrested on the spot.…
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