Nation/World

McConnell rips Obama foreign policy, would send arms to Ukrainian army

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell maintained Thursday that President Barack Obama's foreign policy is deeply troubled.

"You are hard pressed to name a single place in the world where we are in better shape now than we were when he came to office," the Kentucky Republican told WMST's "Mid-Mornings on Main" with Dan Manley in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky.

"When you think of Syria, you think of the endless discussions with Iran. And so you got Vladimir Putin sitting there looking at that—a guy who believes that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the single biggest disaster, geopolitical disaster, of the previous century, who yearns to restore the empire—and he looks at American leadership and concludes that they won't do anything

"And we're not talking about sending in the troops here, nobody is talking about that, but clearly sanctioning a few friends of Putin's is not going to be viewed as a serious response. But, we are where we are."

Here's more of McConnell's comments:

"Here is what I would do: I would be sending arms to the Ukrainian army. I would encourage the European Union to expand and take in Ukraine…I would provide serious assistance to the Ukrainians so that they could defend themselves."

"I would renew the discussions that the president just dropped, the idea of missile defense and the Czech Republic and Poland at the beginning of his term as a sort of a gesture to the Russians. I would reengage with the Pols and the Czechs and see if we can't get missile defense back in those countries. All of those steps would indicate without sending in a single American soldier that the U.S. is serious in standing up to this kind of new form of Russian aggression."

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By David Lightman

McClatchy Washington Bureau

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