Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is calling on President Donald Trump to sanction Russia after the Kremlin launched a massive drone and missile attack against Ukraine over the weekend.
A fed-up Grassley demanded on his X account Monday that Trump to take punitive action against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his continued aggression in Ukraine.
“I’ve had enuf of Putin killing innocent ppl. Pres Trump Take action AT LEAST SANCTIONS,” Grassley wrote.
He has previously criticized Putin and has suggested that Russia is playing the U.S. “as a patsy” as it continues its expansionist assault on Ukraine.
His comments come hours after Russia launched the largest aerial attack in its war with Ukraine.
Trump — who has claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine never would have happened had he been in power and that he would end the war in a mere 24 hours — has grown increasingly critical of Putin after the Russian leader shrugged off his attempts to turn down the temperature on the conflict earlier this year.
The president has suggested that Putin has gone “absolutely” crazy recently, insisting that “something has happened to him.”
He is “needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever,” Trump posted Monday, apparently forgetting Russia’s attacks on civilian areas since the beginning of the war.
In 2023, Russia fired a missile that destroyed a nine-story residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine, killing 46 people, including six children, and injuring another 80. The destruction left approximately 400 people homeless.
Trump suggested that Putin may want to take over all of Ukraine.
“I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, responding to Trump’s newfound outrage toward Putin, waved off the president’s concerns as “emotional overload.”
Trump has been trying to convince Putin to agree to an immediate 30-day ceasefire — an idea that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky supports — but Putin has refused to come to the table before more details of a proposed ceasefire are discussed.
Among U.S. lawmakers, some Republicans, like Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been critical of the nation’s assistance to Ukraine.
Grassley, who is the president pro tempore of the Senate, has been critical of Putin and Russia, and called for Trump to issue the “toughest of sanctions” on Putin last month.
