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On Thursday, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville accused President Biden of “[turning] a speech honoring HEROES into a Ukraine pep rally, bragging about body counts.”
During Biden’s D-Day address, the president compared the fight against the Axis powers to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war. He stated that “Ukraine has been invaded by a tyrant bent on domination,” pointed to Ukrainian military accomplishments, and said that the U.S. would continue to stand with Ukraine.
Since the war began in February 2022, the United States has approved around $175 billion in total aid for Ukraine, mostly in the form of already purchased military equipment. Tuberville has been one of the senators most critical of this ongoing aid for the Ukrainian war effort.
During a thirty minute interview on Steve Bannon’s television show and podcast, “War Room,” Bannon called Tuberville “one of the leaders in the debacle we had on Ukraine.”
Bannon is the former executive chairman of white nationalist news site Breitbart and was the White House’s chief strategist during the first months of the Trump administration. On Thursday, Bannon was ordered to report to jail by July 1 after being found guilty of two charges of contempt of Congress.
In 2023, a study from the Brookings Institute found that his podcast War Room “shared the most unsubstantiated or false claims” out of a data set of 79 political podcast series.
On Wednesday’s episode of War Room, Tuberville complained about how much aid America has given to Ukraine, called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” and repeatedly sympathized with Putin.
“We said we’d support [Ukraine] and the neocons, not me, Republicans and Democrats have put $200 billion into this,” he said. “We don’t know where the money’s gone.”
Tuberville also asked listeners to put themselves in Putin’s shoes. “If you’re Putin, you don’t want our missiles in Ukraine pointing at him,” he said. “We wouldn’t want them in Mexico.”
“Putin just kind of sitting back, watching what’s going on, wondering when y’all gonna come over and we’ll draw a line here,” Tuberville continued. “He doesn’t want Ukraine, he doesn’t want Europe. He’s got enough land of his own. He just wants to make sure that he does not have United States weapons in Ukraine pointing at Moscow.”
A recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations says that “the main lines of advance during the invasion have suggested Putin had far greater territorial ambitions” than he initially claimed. Additionally, Russian peace offers have consistently required that Ukraine allow Russia to keep four conquered provinces, around 15 percent of Ukraine’s pre-war territory.
At one point during the interview, Bannon also said that “the Russian people have always been our allies” to Tuberville’s apparent approval. Tuberville went on to say he was worried Biden might start a war with Russia to win re-election in November.
As APR has reported on previously, this is not the first time Tuberville has spread conspiracy theories about America’s foreign policy, including the nation’s involvement in Ukraine.
