WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Monday joined CNN’s the Lead with Jake Tapper to discuss the latest on the Russia-Ukraine crisis:

On Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov , Murphy said: “It's likely that [Putin] wants that commitment that Ukraine not join NATO in some kind of legally binding document. That is just simply not going to happen. We are not going to end 70 years of NATO's open door policy because Vladimir Putin is throwing a fit.”

Murphy continued: “This is going to be a bloody long term insurgency. They're going to be body bags returning to Russia on a regular basis. And it may be that as he gets closer to the day that he has to decide if he's going in, he's getting better advice on exactly how bloody this is going to be for his own country.”

“[Putin] sort of thinks he can get it all. He thinks that he's going to be able to invade Ukraine, still be able to sell gas and oil to Europe, and still be able to have his oligarchs travel the world. We're going to have to make clear to him that's not the case, and we're going to have to convince our European friends to go along with us,” Murphy added on how the West should be engaging with Putin.

On the Biden administration’s ongoing efforts to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Murphy said: “What the Biden administration doing is pretty exceptional. This set of transatlantic and global sanctions that is being ready to against Russia is going to be without precedent in world history, and it is going to deal a significant blow to the Russian economy.”

You can watch Murphy’s full interview here.

 

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