Military aid, lethal aid since 2014, $650 million. it s because you have 130,000 russian troops there surrounding three different parts of russia s borders, and you have to take seriously that the potential for an invasion is real. it s getting the ukrainians to be prepared and give them the wherewithal to defend themselves, at the same time understanding the economic needs they have. senator risch, you said russia is just setting up a pretext forward. do you see any scenario in which russia chooses not to invade at this point? well, i don t think that decision has been made yet. there s a lot of us that believe that, if putin sees weakness, if he sees bumbling, if he sees ineptitude, if he sees indecision, he will take advantage of that. i don t think he s made a decision to do that yet. what bob and i and our coalition
So this is a really difficult and kind of inscrutable position they re taking. they re very relaxed. there don t seem to be a lot of military maneuvers. that could be explained by secrecy, and also the fact that the ukrainians don t want to give what they think the russians want, which is a pretext forward. if the russians start to see that the ukrainians are maneuvering a lot, taking what the russians would handily interpret and project as a pretext for invasion, then the russians could hold that in front of the international committee and say, look, we see these ukrainian troop movements and we have to defend our national security. the entire type leading up until now, we ve been hearing that the russians have been saying that the aggression is on the part of the west and on the part of the ukrainians. it s a very handy message and one they can easily exploit if they see the ukrainian military start to maneuver in a very
Pretext forward. do you see any scenario in which russia chooses not to invade at this point? well, i don t think that decision has been made yet. there s a lot of us that believe that, if putin sees weakness, if he sees bumbling, ineptitude, if he sees indecision, he will take advantage of that. i don t think he s made a decision to do that yet. what bob and i and our coalition of bipartisan senators are attempting to do is to project the resolve that we have as americans to see that he doesn t do that, to provide the strength, project the strength and convince him that this would be a very, very bad idea and it s going to be extremely painful. this is not the same as crimea, when he did this last time. there is substantially, substantially more worldwide