Pelosi Remarks at Media Stakeout Following White House Meeting on Congressional Delegation to Poland and Ukraine

Washington D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined Chairman Jim McGovern, Chairman Gregory Meeks, Chairman Adam Schiff, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congressman Bill Keating and Congressman Jason Crow for a media stakeout following a White House meeting with President Joe Biden on the Congressional delegation to Poland and Ukraine. Below are the Speaker's remarks:

Speaker Pelosi. Good evening. I guess it's evening by now – good afternoon in any event.

It is with great gratitude that we visited the President to thank him for affording us the opportunity to take an historic trip to Ukraine. Our purpose in going was always about the security of our country, the security of democracy in the world – that is attached, of course, to the economy and, of course, to governance. So we came, we went – it was a magnificent visit. We reported to the press on that as soon as we came back with President Zelenskyy. He – we had a very, shall we say, long and detailed meeting with him about four subjects, and those would have been security, sanctions, humanitarian assistance and economic assistance to his country.

We were very honored to have the opportunity to report about our trip to President Biden, to report to him that the meeting that we had with President Zelenskyy began with the President spending a good deal of time praising President Biden and thanking him and the United States for our support in the fight for democracy. We in turn, of course, praised the courage of the Ukrainian people in the fight for democracy in their country and really for the world. So we had made our report to the President, we also reported on our visit with the President of Poland, President Duda, about how we thanked them for their support for the refugees. But also, our visit with the 82nd Airborne was one that was very instructive to us as well, in terms of our purpose of our trip.

Any questions?

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Q. Madam Speaker, can you give us a sense, having just been to Ukraine, about your feeling on the prospects of Ukraine funding being passed and the decision to separate them from COVID funding?

Speaker Pelosi. Well, the legislation we put forward is because of the urgency that we saw when we were in Ukraine and in Poland. We had planned always to meet our needs of the American people.

COVID is a challenge to us and we need the resources to meet that challenge. But when the President said this morning or last night, yesterday, but this morning publicly, that we should proceed, and then we will deal with the COVID issue. We were told by the Republicans in the Senate that they were not going to support the package combined. We can't wait. Time is of the essence. Time is life and death situations there. Now, the Chairman of the Rules Committee has –

Chairman McGovern. It's being reported out now. Ready to go to the Floor and we're going to expedite it. We'll vote on it tonight.

Q. Do you have a timeline?

Chairman McGovern. Really quickly. So by early evening.

Q. Congressman Schiff, you said after that President Zelenskyy, during this trip, had detailed weapons that they believed they needed that you had not heard of before. What exactly did he say was the most important?

Chairman Schiff. I can't comment on the specifics of his asks or our recommendations to the President, but we are trying to make sure that Ukraine has everything it needs to defend itself. We think the quickest way to bring this war to an end is to make sure that Ukraine can defend its territory and its sovereignty, and a combination of military assistance and tightening the economic sanctions, we believe, is the quickest way to bring this to an end, but, but we're not prepared to go into specifics publicly.

Q. Does it include longer range artillery?

Chairman Schiff. I'm not going to comment any further.

Speaker Pelosi. Mr. Crow, Mr. Crow – when we visited with the 82nd Airborne, we were honored to be accompanied and led by Congressman Jason Crow, who had been a member of the 82nd Airborne. And did you want to speak to the weapons issue?

Congressman Crow. Yeah, the Ukrainians were very clear that, to meet the next evolution of this battle, they need greater rocket artillery – they need some version of the multiple launch rocket system that's going to extend the range, so they can defend their urban cities and push back Russian artillery, but also retake territory that have been seized by the Russians and that they need the multiple launch rocket systems to do that. They need more advanced drones that can come back and rearm and re-equip, and they also need longer range and more advanced anti-ship missile systems to push back and to help open up the port of Odessa for food shipments. And then the last piece was training. They need a more consistent rotational training system, so they don't have to take their very seasoned, most experienced soldiers off the front line for weeks or months at a time. They want to build a more rapidly – move them off of the front, retrained in Europe and then return to the front very quickly.

Q. Madam Speaker, you said that this is an issue of life or death but on the COVID [inaudible]. What is at risk in Ukraine if this isn't passed right away? And secondly, what is at risk in America for COVID relief if that isn't passed right away?

Speaker Pelosi. Well, we're overdue on passing the COVID relief, and that is of the highest priority for us, at home and again globally as well. But the fact is, is that we have to debate them separately, because they have different – shall we say points of difference among our – the other issues that some might want to attach to COVID that they would not attach to the Ukraine package.

So the – when people go to war in the way that the cowardly Putin has done – he didn't go fight a war against soldiers. He went to fight a war against children, against families, against civilians, bombing schools and maternity hospitals and kidnapping children. We've heard cases not from President Zelenskyy, but – only – but from Members of Parliament, women Members of Parliament who worked grassroots – people that we have known in our relationship with Ukraine before, many of us, about the raping of little girls and women and kidnapping children and sending them to Russia.

So even if you just take out the – what we talked about here, weapons. When you talk about the personal toll, because a coward is leading the fight and brutalizing his own people, turning them into animals in the way they are treating other people.

So again, we think the size of the package is significant because it will enable the Ukrainians to more efficiently and quickly – to deal with the challenge that they – that they face. Congresswoman Barbara Lee is actually part of writing the bill – where did she go? Writing the bill as the Chair of the Subcommittee of jurisdiction, and she can speak to what she saw in Poland and the rest.

Congresswoman Lee. Sure, thank you very much. You know, this is a crisis of war – Putin's war – that has created havoc and death and destruction, and I'm so pleased that we're bringing this bill to the Floor. Thank you to our Rules Committee Chair and our Speaker because it's an emergency. In the bill, we have about – over eight – a little over $18 billion under the humanitarian assistance resources for economic assistance, for budget support for the Ukrainian people. We have provisions, because we learned and heard more about human trafficking of women and girls, which is, again, a crime against humanity.

And so the humanitarian issues are urgent. We must pass this bill tonight. And it'll be probably close to about $40 billion, I believe. And I think it creates an excellent balance between our security and what the Ukrainian people need for their defense, but also for the humanitarian concerns that we all have. Thank you again.

Speaker Pelosi. On the subject of sanctions – on the subject of sanctions, which was a major part of our discussion and shared some – we had an exchange on the most effective use of sanctions. We were blessed to have with us the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who – where'd he go? Mr. Meeks, right behind – you have an advantage you can see, where we want his – Mr. Meeks, you want to speak to the sanctions piece of this?

Chairman Meeks. There'll be more sanctions coming. We are going to tighten it and work together in a multilateral way with our allies. We want to make sure that there's no way around and no way to get out of sanctions and avoiding sanctions. And there's ways that we need to make sure that the Russians cannot go to other countries on a tourist visa or others to try to avoid the sanctions that are being placed on them. And there is a focus and a concentration so the people within Russia will understand what really is taking place. And that we will make sure, when we're looking at this, that there's very little, if anything, coming from any other country going into Russia, or taking or accepting anything coming out of Russia. So we're focused, because from the inside, to put pressure on Russia, their economy and show that we are all united against the aggression and the evil actions of Vladimir Putin.

Speaker Pelosi. And on that subject – on that subject, I just – Mr. McGovern has talked about his role as Chair of the Committee, but he is the leader on food security in the world. And he wanted to make the connection between –

Chairman McGovern. I mean, one of the things we talked about with the President, we talked about with President Zelenskyy, is that Putin's war against Ukraine is not just against the Ukrainian people. It is against the world's most vulnerable people. It's against the world's poorest people. Hisblocking the shipment of food from Ukraine – wheat, sunflower oil, maize – to get to Africa and to get to the Middle East is going to result in a hunger crisis much worse than anybody anticipated. It's also going to result in higher food prices globally, including here in the United States. So in addition to what he's doing against the Ukrainian people, which is horrific, he is adding to that – to what I think is a crime – which is criminal, which is creating a global food crisis. And we have to figure out a way to get that food out of Ukraine to the people of the world who need it. So that's another reason why we all have a stake in this.

Speaker Pelosi. Mr. Keating of Massachusetts is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs of – of Europe, Eurasia, [Energy, and the Environment] and brought that perspective to their – our meetings.

Congressman Keating. Thank you, Madam Speaker. One of the things we did talk about with the President was accountability for Putin's actions, and that means getting involved in the issue of war crimes. We talked to Ukrainians on the ground. They're working with people. They want that documented. We're working together, our country, with NGOs, with Ukrainians, with other people to make sure that we're doing our job now, so that people that are responsible for this can be prosecuted later on. And that's another thing we talked about.

Speaker Pelosi. And we have to go now, because we're bringing our bill to the Floor in a strong, bipartisan way. And we're very proud of the unity we have in our Congress on this subject. I'm very proud of the unity that President Biden has engendered here – and, of course, throughout the world – on this subject. Thank you very much. We have to go.