Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called on Congress to pass legislation that will make permanent the sanctions imposed on Russia and President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine.
Cruz, who for nearly a year had been calling for sanctions against Russia, said President Joe Biden "finally, reluctantly" was "dragged into doing" what the senator had been encouraging.
Biden on Wednesday announced that his administration will impose sanctions on Nord Stream 2 AG, the company in charge of building Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
"They have temporarily imposed sanctions on Nord Stream 2, but Putin doesn’t believe these are real, doesn’t believe they're credible," Cruz told Fox Business on Monday.
"What Congress needs to do is take up sanctions legislation this week that makes clear that the sanctions on Nord Stream 2 are permanent and irreversible, and it takes away Joe Biden's ability to surrender to Putin as he's been doing for the past year."
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday that the U.S. will impose more sanctions on Russia if Moscow continues to escalate its conflict with Ukraine.
Cruz blamed Biden for empowering Putin to attack Ukraine.
"Our enemies watched President Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal and took a measure of the man in the Oval Office," Cruz tweeted Tuesday morning. "As was easily predictable, and indeed as I said at the time, that catastrophic policy is creating crisis after crisis for us and our allies."
On Fox Business, Cruz added: "Every enemy of America looked at the United States and took the measure of the man in the Oval Office, and they determined, sadly, that Joe Biden was weak and feckless and ineffective. It made them far more aggressive."
In mid-January, the Senate failed to pass a Cruz-sponsored bill to slap sanctions on Russia's Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline a day after Democrats unveiled their own legislation.
The Biden administration in May waived sanctions on the company behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Europe and its chief executive.
"We had bipartisan agreement in Congress on sanctioning the Nord 2 pipeline. I authored those sanctions — I wrote them," Cruz told Fox Business. "We saw overwhelming support in Congress for those sanctions. President [Donald] Trump signed those sanctions into law, and when he did so, Putin stopped constructing the pipeline literally the day President Trump signed my sanctions legislation into law.
"Joe Biden came into the White House, waived those sanctions, gave Putin a multibillion dollar gift and that is why we are seeing this invasion of Ukraine."
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