Ben Sasse to Biden: Zelenskyy Not 'Dead Man Walking'

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said Sunday Ukraine needs to be rearmed "constantly" in its fight to fend off Russia’s invasion of the country — and that President Joe Biden has to adopt a strategy "to help Ukraine win" and stop listening to advisers who say its leader is "a dead man walking."

In an interview with "Fox News Sunday," Sasse lamented the Biden administration has been too slow in arming Ukraine.

"We don't need to have fighter pilots in the air, we don't need to have boots on the ground inside Ukraine, because Ukrainians have the will to fight," he said. "We need to have the will to rearm them constantly."

According to Sasse, the United States needs to have sent "more Javelins, we need more Stingers, we need the Switchblade drones to have been there weeks ago."

"My message to [President Joe Biden] is simple: Stop listening to all of your advisers who say [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is a dead man walking," he said. "Stop listening to those who say that Ukraine is inevitably going to lose. We should have the president's strategy to help Ukraine win. We should be on the side of these freedom fighters and we are too slow [in] almost every step we take."

Sasse also defended his vote against a spending bill that included aid to Ukraine.

"The bill we passed this week was crap," he charged. "It's thousands of pages, comes out in the middle of the night, the Ukrainian portion of that was eight-tenths of 1% of the bill. We should be focused on the urgent issue, which is rearming the Ukrainians, and [it] could have been done as a stand-alone bill in 10 minutes."

Sasse said the United States "should be cutting Russia off from all international markets."

"That should include oil," he said. "We should also be moving toward energy independence. …by demonstration should get out of the way of North American energy production so that Europeans don't continue to make so many stupid decisions of tying themselves to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Putin's energy supplies, so we should cut off Russia from energy supplies but we should be taking every step to ratchet up the pressure."

Sasse added that the United States has to persuade the world to look to America and not the Communist Chinese Party.

"The future of the world 10 years out is either going to be more free-trade, human rights, global navigation of the seaways, transferring contracts… condemnation like is happening to the Uyghurs [in China] or it's going to be more of the globe drifting towards Chinese Communist Party leadership," he said.

"We need our commander-in-chief to be strong both in these conversations with [Chinese Communist Party] Chairman Xi [Jinping]."

He was also effusive in his praise of Zelenskyy’s speech to Congress.

"It's a pretty glorious thing to see human courage on a large stage," he said. "We believe in America… Our rights come from God and government is just a shared tool to secure them and you see that spirit, that American, Philadelphia 1787 [Constitutional Convention] spirit in Zelenskyy right now."

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