President Joe Biden did not go far enough with the sanctions he has announced against Russia, and such measures should have begun when Russian President Vladimir Putin began amassing troops on the Ukraine border, not after he launched his full-scale invasion, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., said Friday on Newsmax.
"I have been saying we need sanctions immediately, and I'm just not the only one," Reschenthaler said on "Wake Up America," pointing out that Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has sponsored two bills calling for immediate sanctions.
"We were saying that if Russia invades, it will be too late for sanctions. Even the Biden administration admits these sanctions don't go far enough. Why have we not taken swift action to take punitive sanctions on Putin personally and those in his family and the oligarchs' center closest to him? That could equate to real pain quickly."
The United States should also have moved to block Russia from the SWIFT money messaging service as well, which would "cripple their financial sector," Reschenthaler said.
But by waiting, "we're in a position of weakness with negotiation," Reschenthaler said. "Unfortunately, we have some estimates that there are hundreds of dead Ukrainians where we could have we could have likely prevented this.
"We should have also provided a lot more Stinger missiles to the Ukrainians, a lot more small arms, anything they need to wage a guerrilla war. We should have been jamming Russian communications. There's a myriad of options that we should have been doing militarily, short of kinetic operations in terms of boots on the ground."
There are reports that Russia could take over Kyiv in the next few days, but Reschenthaler said he didn't think Putin will stop with just seizing Ukraine's capital city.
"I think he wants to take over all of Ukraine," he said. "I think Putin wants to create a vassal state, a satellite state, and bring Ukraine back into his idea of where the USSR used to be, and realign those eastern Soviet bloc states."
Putin has claimed that his military operations in Ukraine are being staged to "denazify" the country, but Reschenthaler called that ludicrous.
"He's going to use that as a pretext to have this kill and capture list with top leaders of the Ukrainian government," the congressman said. "He'll neutralize them and then set up this puppet regime. I think it's going to look a lot more like that."
Reschenthaler added that he's concerned the Russian actions will resemble those used by the Chinese Communist Party in that country's western provinces.
"That should terrify us because we're talking serious human rights violations and abuses," Reschenthaler said. "Russia will be able to come in and monitor on online social media, et cetera and clamp down on control, just like the Chinese Communist Party has done with the Uyghurs in the west."
The Russian invasion of Ukraine will also result in an "absolute humanitarian crisis," and that was "caused by Joe Biden's weaknesses and vacillation," Reschenthaler said.
"The fact that he said they were red lines and never honored those red lines when they were crossed, the fact that we didn't shut down Nord Stream 2 when Joe Biden took office, and if I can just say a lot of this is also because we have not done a good job in our energy exportation … it created this environment."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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