For more infomation >> Quebec provincial police news conference on deadly mosque shooting - Duration: 45:12. 
Trump ally US should 'start all over again' with Russia.
By JOEL GEHRKE.
One of President Trump's staunchest foreign policy allies in Congress wants him to reverse
the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
"I would hope that our president removes those sanctions and tells President Putin that we're
going to start all over again," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who chairs the House
Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, told the Washington
Examiner.
"He's not going to call it a reset, because that's become a cliche, but we're going to
take away these sanctions and build a whole new relationship which facilitates working
together to attain mutually-beneficial goals � rather than the current policy, which
is unending hostility and belligerence toward Russia, no matter what it does."
Rohrabacher has a good relationship with Trump; he was in the running for an appointment in
the State Department as Trump conducted his search for secretary of state.
Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, a phone conversation that has
sparked concern in Congress and international foreign policy circles that Trump will reverse
the Ukraine sanctions.
Rohrabacher has a proposal, which he avoided saying if he has shared with Trump, for lifting
the sanctions without totally conceding to Russia's actions in Ukraine.
He wants Trump to reverse the sanctions in exchange for Russia withdrawing from eastern
Ukraine, though not Crimea, a Ukrainian region which Russia annexed in 2014.
At the same time, Rohrabacher said the Ukrainian government should agree to an internationally
monitored referendum in which the people of Crimea vote on whether they want to be part
of Ukraine or Russia.
"Anybody who knows the area knows that these people are pro-Russian, they are Russians,
they consider themselves Russians, they speak Russian," he said.
That proposal is analogous to the oft-broken ceasefire pact known as the Minsk Agreement,
although it goes farther than the Minsk talks by conceding that Crimea � which was taken
in "the first gunpoint land grab in Europe since the end of World War II," as former
NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it � can leave Ukraine.
The sanctions were imposed in order to use economic pressure to force Russia to withdraw
from all the territory its military has taken.
Putin mobilized his military in support of embattled President Victor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian
leader who faced protests after withdrawing Ukraine from an economic agreement with the
European Union.
"We would hope that President Trump heeds the advice of his international allies and
continues to hold Russia accountable for its actions and forces it to come to the table
to negotiate a peaceful resolution to a war the Russian leaders unnecessarily provoked,"
Rasmussen said Friday.
Rohrabacher, who emphasized that he doesn't believe that "Putin's a good guy," disagreed
with that assessment.
"I don't believe Putin started this," he told the Washington Examiner.
"I believe the West started it when they overthrew a pro-Russian democratically-elected government
that was on Russia's border."
He added that Yanukovych should have been removed from power at the regularly schedule
election.
"I am so upset that we didn't just do that because I would have been right there saying
'kick Yanukovych out, what a corrupt son of a bitch,'" Rohrabacher said.
Yanukovych was impeached and removed by Ukraine's parliament after protests against his administration
devolved into a shootout between protesters and security forces.
"I was against any use of force, let alone the use of firearms, I was against bloodshed,"
the former president told the BBC in 2015.
"But the members of the security forces fulfilled their duties according to existing laws.
They had the right to use weapons."
Đăng ký:
Đăng Nhận xét (Atom)
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét