U.S. lawmakers united in outrage over invasion of Ukraine

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers were united on Thursday in condemning Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, urging President Joe Biden to immediately impose crippling economic penalties on Russia even as some Republicans accused him of being too timid in his earlier sanctions response.

Lawmakers heaped almost all the blame for the attack at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in a televised address late Wednesday night declared he was taking military action to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine, which is led by a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust. Already, dozens of Ukrainian troops have been reported killed, according to initial news reports of the Russian military’s air, land and sea attacks on key sites and cities around Ukraine.

Speaking in Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged Biden to “ratchet the sanctions all the way up. Don’t hold any back. Every single available tough sanction should be employed and should be employed now.”

The GOP leader’s comments come as a majority of Americans support tough sanctions on Moscow — and as a majority of Republicans, according to multiple polls, call Putin a strong leader.

Members of both parties called for a likely sprawling aid package that would fund military aid for Ukraine and also humanitarian assistance. But just how large a package, and how quickly one could be cobbled together and approved by both chambers, was not yet clear. The House and Senate are both on recess and back in session next week.

The sanctions that Biden, along with allies in Berlin, London and Brussels, announced Tuesday took some notable punitive steps against Russia that included ending the certification process of the $11 billion Russian-German Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline; sanctioning two Russian financial firms that are used for state-backed development projects and to handle Russian military transactions; and imposing personal sanctions on hundreds of members of Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament, the Duma.

But the heaviest sanctions the United States and Europe could inflict on Russia have been held back on abeyance. Those include sanctions on Russia’s major retail banks, which are relied upon by the Russian general public, and export controls on things such as semiconductors, which would greatly hamper the country’s efforts to modernize and diversify its economy.

But the strongest and most impactful sanctions, according to experts, would be on the export of Russian oil and natural gas. It isn’t clear if Biden and European capitals will choose to deploy that economic “nuclear option,” as doing so would also result in significant pain for European energy importers and badly disrupt the global energy market.

“Russia has begun an unprovoked, unjustified campaign against Ukraine with a full-on invasion. Civilians are being killed. Ukraine is mobilizing its opposition to the Russian invasion. [We] must provide Ukraine with support to defend itself,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff told reporters at a news conference at the Capitol on Thursday. “We also are going to need to, I think, dramatically escalate the sanctions that we place on Russia for this act of naked aggression by the Kremlin dictator. We need to move, I think, to sanction the largest banks in Russia.”

The California Democrat went on to call for sanctions to be imposed that would effectively sever Russian financial institutions from the SWIFT global banking transactions system, freeze assets of Russia’s corrupt oligarchs that are stashed abroad, and ban the export to Moscow of “sophisticated technology for its weapons systems.”