Steven Moore: Republicans are missing the point on Ukraine

I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.

I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we've gotten. I believe Xi and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. I think they're in coordination on this. I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed.

I think he might go to the Balkans next. And that is Speaker Johnson. Now, Speaker Johnson, through a series of legislative maneuvers, including getting a rule that will allow them to have a vote on Ukraine aid. And they're going to get $65 billion, $15 billion for Israel, $8 billion for Indochina.

There's also going to be a border plan within that. Stephen Moore is with us right now. He's a former chief of staff in the U.S. House of Representatives and founder of the Ukrainian-Ukraine Freedom Project, which raises money to aid Ukraine. And you just got back from Ukraine, right?

Yeah, I live in Kiev, and I've been there since day five of the war. And yeah, so I've seen it all. And your thoughts about what Speaker Johnson just said. Time matters. Yeah, exactly. This needs to happen quickly. And he was right to point out that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are working together, Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. And they're working together to cause problems in the Middle East, in Europe, in Asia, and around the world. And we need to focus on pushing back on these folks. Why do you think so many Republicans are not for this?

Yeah, good question. Well, in the House of Representatives, there's about 70 members of the Hell No Caucus that are just not going to vote for Ukraine. There's about 80 that recognize the national security implications, that recognize we're on the verge of World War III here. And then there's that middle ground of about 60 or 70 who would like to do the right thing, understand the national security implications, but are getting the snot beat out of them by their voters. Right.

And the president is now being convinced that loans, short term loans, there are forgivable loans might be the way to go. I think that when people try to minimize this, they'll say this is a conversation that Russia has to have with Ukraine. It's not our problem.

What do you say to that? Yeah. So when people talk about peace negotiations, they don't recognize that Vladimir Putin's already in violation of several dozen ceasefires, treaties. He's in violation of a treaty with the United States.

So I am not and no one's given me a reason to believe that Putin would honor a peace agreement right now when he hasn't honored one since he's been in office. And he's on the front foot. Yeah.

Right now, he's on the move. Yeah. His army right now is bigger than it was when they started the war.

How do you do that? Well, it's just conscription. He's he's conscripting a lot of people.

A lot of people. Yeah. Russia is not a free country. And and so, you know, you you get conscripted and he's he's taken his economy from a civilian economy and he's built it up. So it's now a war economy. So people that think he's not going to go into a NATO nation are not paying attention because he's not building up this military to just have it lying around.

J.D. Vance, senator with military experience, Republican, said this. The Israelis will need this stuff. The Taiwanese need this stuff. And of course, America needs this stuff. Can we possibly fight all of those conflicts at once?

No, the math just doesn't make sense. So what we should be doing is with Ukraine, encouraging them to take a defensive posture, not these disastrous counteroffensive the Biden administration has been promoting. I don't know where J.D. Vance served in the military, but but he's he's not paying attention to incentives because, you know, you you got to stand up to Putin. Putin is a bully.

You know, the reason that he went into Ukraine is because America showed weakness and Biden showed weakness in his withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so you can't we're whether we like it or not, we're in a global conflict. And so the argument that he's using is that, you know, we don't have the weapons.

Well, what we need to do is we need to manufacture those weapons and we need to put ourselves on the war footing that China, Iran and North Korea and Russia are on. Do they believe I that's often said here and I believe it. But when you're sitting there in Kiev. And they say, man, if the U.S. didn't just do a ridiculous dismount from Afghanistan, if they only gave us maybe the lethal aid early on when Obama was president, if they only pushed back more, we wouldn't be in this place. It wouldn't have welled up troops. Then with a telegraphed invasion actually did invasion.

Yeah. Well, what a lot of people don't know is that, you know, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 originally. And the president at the time came over, talked to Congress and said, please send me weapons. And Obama sent blankets. You know who sent weapons in 2017?

Donald Trump. President Trump is the reason that Ukraine was able to hold off the Russians. Javelins. Yeah. Yeah, the javelins.

Yeah, exactly. So the so Donald Trump sent the weapons in 2017. In 2022, the Ukrainians were able to hold off the Russians. I was in Kiev when it was surrounded on three sides by Russians and they used U.S. weapons to push those Russians out. So Stephen Moore, our guest, he is founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project and he's been over in Kiev. He says that the city looks like a city that is not under siege.

It has power. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I live in Kiev. I've lived in Kiev since since the beginning of the war. And when I went there, the line to get in was really short.

The line to get out was really long. And and so but but I went there to help. And why? Because it's the right thing to do, because you Ukrainian. I am not Ukrainian.

You just saw this. I lived in Ukraine for a year in 2018 and made a lot of friends, loved it. And I got a job at an artificial intelligence company, an American one that had 500 Ukrainian employees. So I had all these Ukrainian friends. So how bright they are, how hardworking they are, hardworking, entrepreneurial, freedom loving. I mean, if you know, the Freedom Caucus talks about freedom, but they know nothing about freedom. The Ukrainians know about freedom because they're putting everything on the line for it. So I left my job in January of 2022 and I was trying to figure out, like, what do I do next?

Do I go skiing in the Alps or skiing in the Rockies? And and then my friends in Ukraine started calling me and saying they're bombing Kiev. I don't know what to do. And I'd spent a year or almost two years in Iraq at the beginning of that war.

So I know what to do. So I was watching Corey Mills. I respect him tremendously. He's the one who saved our crew operation, put an operation together to get everybody out of Afghanistan.

He just saved a bunch of people in Haiti. He is now saying this is a problem that Europe really should be handling. He came out and said that he's got an accountability issue, too, with past weapons.

We've gotten them. And he does not believe that this president is committed to your success. So what do you say to people like that who have proven war heroes, who are Republicans, that is just not sold on the the necessary the need for us to be directly to involve providing all these weaponry? Yeah.

So I agree with the last one is that the Biden administration has not done a good job. And they never talk about it. Yeah. They just say, of course, we had to give them what?

As long as it takes. And I hear Ukrainians hate that because they know that they'll lose that. Yeah. Because they have 40 million people as opposed to 125 million Russians. Well, you and I right now are doing more to educate the American people on what's happening in this war than the president's done in two years.

Doesn't talk about it. Yeah. And so let me just come up with a map. Let me just show you where we were in 1938.

Let me just tell you this expansive power. Let me tell you documents that we've gotten out of Russia that shows they have designs and they're not going to invade everybody. They're going to infiltrate Georgia like they have. Now they're part of the Georgia's government. Moldova. They got these two breakaway republics. They keep reaching out to Russia. We've got to help them out. And then Estonia, Lithuania, you start putting pro Russian people in those countries.

You don't need to fire a shot. Yeah. Save the Belarus president, Lochenko. And then you said as a term for a repayment, you become a vassal state.

Yeah. And what we're seeing is that if Ukraine falls, then Russia will be on the border with nine NATO countries. And, you know, I've heard members of Congress even say that Russia will never go to a NATO country.

Well, the NATO countries that are next to Russia who have the most information about Russia and the most to lose are the folks that are putting the most money into Ukraine on per capita basis. Could they be doing more? Europe is doing twice as much at this point as we're doing. Proportionally? Yeah.

No, no, no, no. In gross numbers. I'm telling you. So there's the Kiel Institute in Germany tracks this stuff. And I recommend everyone listening to this go to the Kiel Institute because they track all the donations to Ukraine. Europe is now doing twice as much as we are. They don't have the defense industrial base that we do, but they're sending all kinds of other aid. Right. OK, good.

The other problem is the limitations. I know inside Russia there was a huge drone strike about three weeks ago done by the Ukrainians. We don't. Evidently, we put out a statement. We don't.

We don't condone this. Really, Brian? Is that unbelievable to you? It is insane. You remember what I'm talking about?

I know exactly what you're talking about. You know, there's 12 refineries that the Ukrainians have hit since the beginning of the year. And they've they've taken out something like 20 percent of Russia's gasoline or, you know, petroleum refinery capability.

And that's money that they could they use to to prosecute the war. So and the Biden administration says don't hit refineries, you know, and it's absurd. Don't hit inside Russia. I don't hit refineries inside Russia. Yeah. And it's just crazy. And because, you know, every day, listen, I live in Kiev.

I watch Patriot missile systems take out Kinzel cruise missiles and Iranian drones. Pull up a chair and join me, Rachel Campos Duffy and me, former U.S. Congressman Sean Duffy, as we share our perspective on the discussions happening at kitchen tables across America. Download from the kitchen table.

The Duffy's at Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you download podcasts. We'll be right back. With everything that he could get his arms around. Well, and Zelensky has a lot of flaws, but I'll tell you this at the beginning of that war, he was the president that they needed to push back on on this nonsense. What are his flaws now? You don't like what he's doing now? Well, yes. So so he is fired a bunch of people.

Yeah, he's here's here's what I like. What he's doing is that is that when corruption pops up, he takes it off at the head. And and, you know, the Supreme Court justice of Ukraine is in prison right now for corruption. When there was when there was a 40 million dollar corruption scandal in the Department of Defense, he fired the minister of defense and six of his deputies. So so this is a country that's been struggling against this for decades now. And which is one of the biggest criticisms. That's a corrupt democracy. Why are we supporting it?

Yeah, but I'll tell you this. What I've seen is that is that the aid money is very well protected. There's more oversight on the aid money Ukraine than there was in Afghanistan. KPMG and Deloitte are both monitoring it. And, you know, in terms of weapons, you know, I spent five hours coming out of Ukraine in a border line last time.

I didn't see any, you know, M triple seven houses being towed out of the country. And so there's a real sense with the aid money. People want to hang on to it because you know why? Because they know. I imagine Ukrainians know for a point of survival, if they're caught reselling this to another country, if they're caught manufacturing, giving it to the Russians, whatever it is, it's over. Yeah.

You without age, you got you guys as great a fighters as Ukrainians are without age, you're not going to be able to do anything. But this is the biggest criticism which happened into the money. And no one's saying that as if they know. They say, does every bullet go to the front line? There's all the money go where it is. I don't want to pay for pensions.

Yeah, no. And that those are those are valid things. And I'll tell you this, that the majority of the aid money, that good direct aid money is coming from the Europeans. So we are doing primarily weapons and defense associated things. So how much is the North Korea artillery helped Russia? How much as the dual use weaponry and parts from China helped Russia? How much of those Iranian drones help Russia? Well, I will tell you about the drones for sure.

And all of those have been made a really huge impact. North Korea sent like a million shells, vast amounts. If it wasn't for these countries, Russia wouldn't be able to fight. But the Iranian drones, I think, are particularly concerned because what they've been doing is the Iranians have been shipping the drones to Russia for the last year and a half. Russia has been firing in Ukraine. They've been testing them.

What works, what doesn't work? And, you know, those those those 300 missiles and drones that went to Israel, they were perfected in Ukraine. So Ukraine is Iran's testing ground.

It's amazing. I mean, at first they got to be so embarrassing. This this big behemoth Russia has to go to Iran. And then they everyone was laughing when they brought in North Korea.

But no one's laughing now because now they're Russians are now helping North Korea with their nuclear program. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we're watching the new axis. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I like to refer to it as a four horsemen of the apocalypse. It's it's Iran, Russia, China and North Korea. And they are you know, these guys are all working together. You know, in my view, we are in World War Three right now. And the only people acting on that information are adversaries.

And Steve, my last question to you, you might not be able to answer it. He has former chief of staff in the House with the Ukrainian Freedom Project. You mentioned you moved to Kiev is what would it take for us to expand for profit our military industrial base to the point where Lithuania, Taiwan, Estonia, Poland, now Sweden and Norway. They all want to buy out. Buy it.

Yeah. Your stuff for profit. You know, maybe some like Ukraine's not going to be able to afford it for a while. But these other countries want to be customers and they are our allies and the stronger they are, the less we're going to have to fight. So what would it take to get these companies to understand that there's money to be made at McDonnell Douglas and these other manufacturers and Raytheon? Yeah, well, let me speak to that specifically with the drone war. Drones are the drone wars is leaping in generations in Russia and Ukraine. One of those two countries is the best drone warrior in the world. And and and so and fortunately, Ukraine is our ally, but I don't see a lot of American companies over there taking advantage of the rapid innovation cycle of of building a drone, putting it to the front, finding out what's wrong and, you know, getting another one there next week. And the Ukrainians are doing that. So if it's anyone that has the best technology for drones in the world, it's the Ukrainians.

But the one with the industrial base to make it in a massive way would be the US. Yeah. Well, there's an article in The Wall Street Journal that showed that like Skydio drones, which are defense management manufacturer, they don't work in Ukraine. A friend of mine, an American fighting Ukraine, had two teal Golden Eagle drones, which are, again, a defense firm that's got a contract at the Pentagon.

He could not get them to work. So, you know, what does work? Chinese drones, DJI.

What does work is Ukrainian drones. So we really this is a wake up call, Brian. We need to be awake. We need to wake up and make sure we're getting with the program, with our defense industrial.

And I just think if it is explained effectively, if someone understood systems and massive manufacturing, this is a for profit industry. As Americans, we kind of like that. Yeah, man. It's a win win. We're capitalists.

Last time I checked. Steve, I appreciate everything you're doing. I think the cause is great. And soon, I hope you walk out of here knowing $65 billion is behind you because we have to be successful. Absolutely.