DALLAS — As Russian troops continue to mount on the border with Ukraine and Western officials warn of an impending invasion, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is blaming President Joe Biden for the latest act of Kremlin aggression.

What You Need To Know

  • Sen. Ted Cruz has criticized President Biden’s waiving of sanctions on a Russian gas pipeline to Europe

  • Cruz is now blaming the president for the current crisis with Russian troops on Ukraine’s border, saying it's because Biden lifted the sanctions

  • The U.S. has warned that Russia could be planning a winter invasion of Ukraine and is already massing troops on the border

  • The U.S. and Europe are in talks to consider a new round of sanctions on Russia should it invade Ukraine

Cruz, a Republican, is pointing the finger at Biden for kowtowing to the Kremlin by waiving sanctions on a contentious Russian gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, and thus giving Putin the green light to once again threaten Ukraine with an attack. 

“This calamitous foreign policy disaster is Joe Biden’s fault,” Cruz said this week on the Senate floor. “This is the direct consequence of Joe Biden’s surrender to Vladimir Putin on Nord Stream 2.”

In statements made on the Senate floor this week, Cruz called for the U.S. to immediately re-impose sanctions on a natural gas pipeline. 

“Joe Biden could stop the invasion today by simply following the law and sanctioning Nord Stream 2,” Cruz told the Senate. 

Sanctioning the pipeline is said to be on the table in discussions between the U.S. and European leaders who are deciding how they will respond should Moscow launch an attack on Ukraine. 

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 22 U.S. House members joined in Cruz’s call for immediate sanctions in a letter to Biden asking that he immediately sanction Nord Stream 2 and increase “defensive lethal assistance” to Ukraine as a method of deterring Russia from an attack. 

“Your Administration must use all tools to deter Russia from taking further action against Ukraine, including economic sanctions,” the letter said. “Congress has a strong bipartisan record on protecting European energy security. We will continue to use future legislative vehicles to protect Central and Eastern Europe from Russian manipulation.”

Cruz has used the Nord Stream 2 issue for months to badger Biden’s foreign policy record and to block Biden’s nominations to key positions in the State Department and other agencies as his administration enters its second year. 

Bashing Biden on Nord Stream 2 misses the point of today’s policymaking discussions when it comes to Russia’s current threat to Ukraine.

“Vladimir Putin has been building up force to try to manipulate Ukraine for years, and he's become more intense on this because of Ukraine's efforts to break away from Russian influence,” said Jeremi Suri, a professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin. “That's what is motivating his behavior. It has nothing to do with the U.S. position on Nord Stream 2.”

Biden’s decision to waive sanctions on Nord Stream 2 in January had “no bearing on Russian aggression on Ukraine,” Suri said. “This is a made-up issue for Ted Cruz because he wants to continue for his own reasons.”

Cruz is not alone in his criticism of Biden’s handling of Putin and other autocrats around the globe, however.

Once operational, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would connect Rusian’s gas supplies to Europe via a pipeline under the Baltic Sea. But critics of the pipeline warn that because the owner and operator of the gas pipeline is a subsidy of the Russian state gas company, Gazprom, it would give the Kremlin leverage to use energy supplies as a weapon.

Also worrying is that Nord Stream 2 bypasses existing pipelines running through Ukraine, a financial transaction upon which Kiev depends for funds as well as gas supplies. Critics argue that cutting Ukraine out of the gas supply chain is another way for the Kremlin to cripple the government in Kiev.  

"Nord Stream 2 is being advanced by Putin's Kremlin not for commercial reasons, but rather to advance Moscow's malignant geopolitical strategy in Europe,” said Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt,  a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “In particular, the project is being advanced to circumvent existing natural gas transit routes via Ukraine, a country against which Russia is currently waging war, and is threatening to further invade by massing over 175,000 troops near the Ukrainian border.”

If Nord Stream 2 is allowed to come into operation, a loss of gas shipments via the Ukrainian system would hurt Kiev’s economic and national security interests, Schmitt said.

The U.S. has long opposed the construction of the pipeline, as did some Poland, the Baltic nationals and other European states well aware of Russian aggression. Former President Donald Trump sanctioned the pipeline’s construction companies after a bipartisan push in Congress.

The sanctions frustrated U.S. allies in Europe, who depend on Russian gas. Biden took office in January and, recognizing that the pipeline’s construction was nearly complete, his administration decided to waive the sanctions as a goodwill gesture toward Germany and other U.S. allies, with whom relations had frayed under the Trump administration.   

In recent weeks, the U.S. has sounded the alarm that the Kremlin has been preparing for a late January invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s neighbor to the south. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine, both former Soviet republics that became independent countries after the breakup of the former Soviet Union in 1991, have been increasing.

Recent satellite images have shown nearly 100,000 troops massed across Ukraine’s eastern, northern and southern borders. 

Some analysts agree with the idea of imposing sanctions on the pipeline now rather than on the condition of invasion.

“Given that an operational Nord Stream 2 would remove a physical infrastructure reliance Russia has on the Ukrainian gas transmission system, stopping Nord Stream 2 now through the imposition of the various sanctions packages that Congress has passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis three times already would go a long way to changing Mr. Putin's calculus of further invasion,” Schmitt said.  

If the U.S. and E.U. nations wait until Nord Stream 2 is operational, “then a significant deterrent effect would be lost, since at that point the Kremlin will have one less dependency in Ukraine to keep in mind,” he said.

Biden held a teleconference with Putin on Tuesday aimed at diffusing the situation and warned the Kremlin leader that he would impose even harsher economic consequences to Russia should Moscow launch an attack on Ukraine. 

Biden has ruled out deploying U.S. forces to Ukraine to deter Russia. The U.S. continues to supply defense weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles, as well as military advisors to Ukraine. 

Russia invaded and then annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 in retaliation for a street revolution centered in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, which ousted a Kremlin-friendly president and ushered in a Western-leaning government. Russia then incited and backed an insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern regions with both military and financial support in a military conflict that has left more than 13,000 dead.

U.S. officials say there is a Kremlin invasion plan in place, but believe Putin has not yet made up his mind about whether he will execute it or not.

Putin assured Biden in the phone call that he was not planning an assault, but blamed the U.S. and NATO troops for escalating tensions between Moscow and Ukraine by supplying military weapons and assistance to Kiev. 

At the heart of the Russian-Ukrainian tension is Putin’s belief that Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union are inherently part of Moscow’s sphere of influence. Putin believes that Western, and particularly the U.S., military assistance in the region is meddling in the Kremlin’s territory. Putin sees NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and indeed the group’s partnership with Ukraine as a direct threat to Moscow.

Ukraine, like Russia, has been an independent country since 1991 when the former Soviet Union broke up, creating new nations across its vast empire.  Since then, the United States has invested billions of dollars in development assistance and now military aid to Ukraine as a sovereign nation entitled to choose its own alliances, including NATO.   

The key player in getting an agreement on a sanctions package with the European Union leaders will be Germany, which recently elected a new government and chancellor. The Biden administration is likely to seek to be a partner rather than dictate the terms of the sanctions with the new German leader, said Jeremi Suri.

“The last thing the U.S. can do with a new German government that we are hoping to work closely with is to try and bully them about their own energy supply,” Suri said. 

The Germans are likely to support a limitation on the Nord Stream 2 deal only if Putin were to attack Ukraine, meaning that “in a strange way, war might get Ted Cruz what he wants,” Suri said.