‘He Has Stalin’s Taste for Blood’ – US Republicans Continue to Criticize Trump’s Ukraine Stance

Following the lead of former vice president Mike Pence, Republican New York congressman Mike Lawler, Nebraska representative Don Bacon, and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham (infamous for his flip-flopping and fence-sitting on US President Donald Trump’s tactics) more Republicans lined up in front of the microphones on Wednesday to express disdain for the president’s handling of a peace deal in Ukraine.

Pence, who broke with Trump after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in 2021 in a bid to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden, issued the sort of public rebuke that has become increasingly less rare now that the president’s policies are taking shape.

“Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives,” Pence wrote on X.

Later in the day, he was joined by other prominent GOP voices, including the Senate’s top Republican, Majority Leader John Thune, who disagreed with Trump’s depiction of Zelensky as a dictator, and said that “there’s no question who started the war.”

On Tuesday, Trump complimented his delegation in Saudi Arabia in their rapprochement with Russia, and said that Ukraine should have “never started the war.”

Since then, the backlash from established Republicans (in stark contrast to those junior members in the House, especially, who owe their political careers to Trump alone) has been building. Many conservatives are coming out in defense of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the soldiers who have died defending their country in Russia’s three-year unprovoked invasion.

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Sen. Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, and Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana were among the most direct in their pushback against the Trump administration’s obsequious dealings with the Kremlin.  

Asked by CNN if Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin should be trusted in these negotiations, Wicker responded: “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of life.”

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker told Politico.

Last week, the Southern senator went as far as to say that the new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a “rookie mistake” by claiming it was unrealistic for Ukraine to regain its pre-2014 territory.

Said Kennedy: “Vladimir Putin is a gangster. He’s a gangster with a black heart. He makes Jeffrey Dahmer look like Mother Teresa,” comparing the Wisconsin serial killer and cannibal to the canonized Catholic nun and charity worker.

“He has Stalin’s taste for blood,” Kennedy said.

Some conservatives were more measured in their assessment. When asked if he agreed with Trump that Zelensky is a dictator, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley responded, “I wouldn’t say that, [but] obviously, Ukraine is going to have to be involved in any final negotiated settlement.”

About 10 congressional Republicans this week pushed back on Trump’s anti-Ukraine comments and pro-Kremlin talking points. It only takes three Republicans in the 218-215 House of Representatives to craft legislation condemning the myriad policies and alarming executive orders that have stunned members on both sides of the aisle, but Democrats have commented that even the latest Republican complaints about Trump’s “Orwellian” view of the world will go nowhere, legislatively.

“They can say what ever they want to the press, [but] in the end, they’re not going to do anything about it because they are, to a person, worried about Republican primary challenges,” former congressman from New York, Mondaire Jones told CNN.

Trump has a long record of financially and politically supporting Republican challengers to incumbents who don’t fall in line with his populist far-right agenda.