In the News

In 1958, former Prime Minister of Great Britain Harold Macmillan, paraphrasing a remark from Winston Churchill four years earlier, left us with the great expression: “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

It’s because of our great power that our rivals seek to wound the American way of life through war, cyber-attacks, or economic destruction. We certainly must, and should, routinely jaw-jaw about many of our shared goals and deep concerns.

In the instance of Putin, he has never been interested in jaw-jaw. He is a creature of his KGB upbringing. There was no jaw-jaw with the Chechens in 1999; there was certainly no jaw-jaw with the Georgians, only tanks, in 2008; there was no jaw-jaw, only propaganda, corruption, and death in Putin’s approach to Ukraine during President Obama’s Administration.

Under President Obama, Putin conducted his overt and covert actions in Ukraine with some 10,000 killed in the fighting, including 2,000 civilians. Yet, Obama and his European allies simply looked down at their shoes. In 2014, Putin took Crimea without firing a shot. Putin is a disgrace to the rich, cultural history of the Russian people and has thoroughly corrupted a false and bordering on insane historic narrative regarding his threats and ambitions in Ukraine.

Not satisfied with Stalin’s extermination of four million Ukrainians in the 1930s, Putin seeks the whole enchilada — including the Black Sea, all of Moldova, not to mention his saber rattling along his border with the Baltics.

He has no regard for President Trump or President Trump’s good intentions about stopping the slaughter along the 750-mile frontline where, daily, Putin sends his own young people and those of North Korea’s simply to face certain death.

It’s time for a full rejection of the Obama-Biden approach to this conflict. President Trump is right to effectively demand that the democracies of the European Union gather and forcefully stand up to Putin.

America, as the instrumental force inside the transatlantic alliance, remains ready to stand shoulder to shoulder to back this European resolve. This is something that neither Obama nor Biden would do. They simply took the easy way out by agreeing to whatever the weakest European voice was at the time.

This European attitude of “here, let me hold your coat” has plagued and frustrated all American presidents from Eisenhower to Trump. Jack Kennedy famously called them freeloaders and stated how wrong it was to let the Europeans “live off the fat of the land” in American economic and military security.

Here’s what needs to happen now:

The U.S. and our European allies must agree that we will not support the immoral importation of Russian oil and gas. Europe has affordable, effective alternatives.

The U.S. and our European allies should work through sanctions and other forms of economic statecraft to communicate firmly and consistently to the large non-European buyers of Russian oil and gas that the time to act is now.

Congress should act by immediately passing Congressman Zach Nunn’s bipartisan PEACE Act. This proposal would finally kneecap Russia’s energy revenues — which still total over $200 billion per year — by imposing secondary sanctions on the country, including for Gazprom and Rosneft.

It passed out of the Financial Services Committee by a vote of 53 to 1. It would be the first intensive sanctioning of the Russian banking industry since the invasion.

Under Congressman Nunn’s PEACE Act, the U.S. would take the Russian sovereign assets we’ve immobilized and let the Ukrainians use them to purchase defensive weapons. While I fully support America doing its part on day one in this regard, I also respect President Trump’s fundamental belief that Europe needs to step up first and foremost with us as full partners to achieve the desired results.

Congress should also fully consider, debate, amend, and pass the sanction legislation offered by Senator Lindsey Graham, which has 84 cosponsors, and its companion in the House sponsored by Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick.

The president should, as a part of the newfound backbone in the G7, implement the REPO Act, which I worked on diligently with former Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul and Senate Foreign Relations Chair, Jim Risch. This measure, signed into law in 2024, puts direct and immediate heat on Russian sovereign assets held outside the country.

Congress should also authorize funding for the United States Geological Survey to fully review all Soviet-era geological surveys of Ukraine, both in the contested Donbas region as well as in free Ukraine, and provide Congress and the administration an up-to-date assessment of the strategic minerals available to support Ukraine’s future economic development and industrial base.

The time for action is now.

Let’s not look back with regret that Congress did not act in the face of Putin’s corrupt, catastrophic, and contemptuous regime that laughs in the face of his European neighbors and our American president.

You can watch Rep. Hill's fulll Floor remarks HERE.