If Russian President Vladimir Putin opts to use chemical or biological weapons in the fight against Ukraine, he and Russia will most likely make it look like "someone else did it," Sen. Marco Rubio said Sunday.
"That's his history," the Florida Republican said on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo."
"We might see [them] deployed in an urban area, and they would stage it to look like it was the Ukrainians that were using chemical weapons."
Another option would be the use of a biological or disease-carrying attack, Rubio warned, noting that Russia has been arguing for weeks that NATO and the United States have laboratories in Ukraine.
Rubio has been concerned about the potential of cyberattacks being carried out against the United States, and he said that as the situation is today, Putin must change his battlefield conditions because his military is "stuck in a quagmire" with Ukraine.
"They're stuck," he said.
"They're stalled. So how can he escalate? He has a handful of options. Chemical and biological, cyber's another option. An attack against the United States, against one of our companies, they'll say, look, we have access to these companies, these industries. Obviously, the ones I keep an eye on are telecommunications, banking, and energy, oil and gas companies, because those are the ones that would most hurt the country. That would be his equivalent of sanctions against the U.S. economy."
Meanwhile, Rubio said he has not been briefed about the telephone call between President Joe Biden and China's President Xi Jinping, but he does believe that Jinping and China are "100% on Russia's side" but hiding it because it hurts their worldwide standing.
"Number one, they figure as long as Russia is strong or strong enough, it distracts us from focusing on China," said Rubio, adding that he thinks China will try to create an alternative to the international SWIFT banking system so it can still trade with Russia if that avenue is cut off over the war in Ukraine.
"We should be sanctioning every one of these Chinese entities that does business with Putin," said Rubio. It's as simple as that. We need to announce that any Chinese company or entity that is helping Russia evade sanctions will also be sanctioned."
However, Rubio said he doesn't think Xi will be invading Taiwan in the next six months, but he doesn't think "we will finish this decade" without China making a move.
"I think certainly by the middle part of this decade, in the next few years, they're going to be doing something," said Rubio. "I'd watch closely in October, November of this year…Taiwan is to China what Ukraine is to Putin. Their preference is for Taiwan just to surrender to say, look, America's not going to do anything about it, we might as well surrender and negotiate the terms by which we fall under your umbrella. That, I think, is his priority."
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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