(NewsNation Now) — A U.S. congresswoman who is a Ukrainian immigrant called on America to do more to help the Ukrainian government in its fight against Russia following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
“This is a very dire situation for [Ukrainians] that requires action,” Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind said in an interview with NewsNation’s Marni Hughes on “Prime.” “So I think we do a lot of talk but we need to start to do more of the walk.”
She believes Russian oligarchs need to be more severely sanctioned and punished to put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It isn’t the first time she has called on the U.S. to further punish Russia. She called for Putin to be isolated from the world during a news conference before Biden’s State of the Union.
“It is not a war, it’s a genocide because we have a crazy man who believes he has the whole world hostage,” Spartz said at the news conference Tuesday, referring to Putin. “My mom, she says no, don’t cry. We are not crying here, we’re going to fight, but just give us some guns so we don’t just fight with sticks.”
On Tuesday, the sixth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces bombarded Ukraine’s second-largest city and advanced its reportedly 40-mile-long convoy of military equipment closer to the country’s capital, Kyiv.
Currently, the United Nations is reporting that at least 136 civilians have been killed since the Russian offensive began last week, but the real toll is believed to be higher.
More than half a million people have fled the country.
Spartz’s 95-year-old grandmother lived through the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, but said the Russian invasion is the worst situation she’s ever experienced, Spartz told media members.
When asked if her family members, many of whom remain in the war-torn country, are safe, Spartz said nobody is safe in Ukraine.
“They’re killing women and children, doing bombs, vacuum bombs, carpet bombs, they are using illegal weapons,” Spartz said. “They’re leveling the cities to the ground, destroying the people, they’re slaughtering them like animals.”
Born in 1978 in then-Soviet Ukraine, Spartz came to the United States in 2000 after meeting her husband, who’s from Indiana, according to her website. She became a citizen in 2006, and in 2020, won the House seat for Indiana’s 5th district. Spartz is the country’s first Ukrainian-born Congress member.
In her remarks, Spartz called out Biden for what she characterized as a lack of action on his part.
“What, is he going to wait when millions die, then he’s going to do more? We have not just a moral duty. We are the leaders of the free world,” Spartz said. “They’re not asking them to fight for us, they ask us to help.”
After Putin initially attacked Ukraine last Wednesday night, Biden tweeted that the U.S. and its allies will respond “in a united and decisive way.”
As Russian attacks on Ukraine became more intense, the Biden administration issued more sanctions on the country. His first set of sanctions cut Russia off from accessing hundreds of billions in assets in U.S. financial markets, including freezing the assets of four major Russian banks. The next day, Biden took a step further, and announced his administration will freeze the assets of Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“They need to understand that we’re serious about the sanctions, not (doing) a little bit here and maybe we’ll do little bit of this,” Spartz said according to C-SPAN. “(Biden) must act decisively fast or the blood of many Ukrainians will be on his hands too.”
Biden has defended his sanctions against Russia, saying that they are already having a crippling effect on the Russian economy.
But the president has made it clear the U.S. plan is to go after Russia financially, not militarily.
“Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict with Russia in Ukraine,” he has previously said.