Back from a congressional trip to Poland’s border with Ukraine, Rep. Tom Reed last Monday painted a bleak portrait of a war that he expects to drag on, with potentially devastating impacts on Europe’s supply of food and fuel later this year.
Returning with a bipartisan delegation that also visited Warsaw, Berlin, Copenhagen and Greenland, Reed said Russia’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine could stymie the planting of crops in what he called “the breadbasket of Europe.” The war could also disrupt the flow of natural gas from Russia that some European nations still rely on, thereby threatening not just higher prices, but also grave shortages that would endanger lives beyond Ukraine.
“I’m very concerned that as we go and as this war lingers into the winter, we could have a genocide level type of event, (of a) magnitude that’s even beyond the level of genocide that’s occurring today,” Reed said.
Asked to elaborate, Reed noted that Russia now appears to be focusing on attacks in Ukraine’s east, where much of the nation’s grain is grown and where a pipeline carries Russian natural gas through Ukraine and toward other European countries. Ukraine is among the world’s leading producers of wheat and corn, much of which is shipped westward to Europe, and according to the International Energy Agency, Germany relied on Russia for nearly half its natural gas in 2020.
“If that pipeline is turned off, and if that food is not able to be planted and we miss this growing season, what that means come winter, it’s going to get awfully cold and people are going to get awfully hungry. And that’s going to be further devastation: a humanitarian crisis of which we haven’t seen in many of our lifetimes,” Reed said.
Reed made his comments after he and his congressional colleagues met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Polish President Andrzej Duda, several of their top aides and Danish officials. The lawmakers also stopped in Greenland to observe the impacts of climate change, but the focus of the trip was on Ukraine.
“We need to bring an end to this conflict sooner rather than later,” because the longer the war lingers, the more at risk food and energy supplies will be, Reed said. “And that means even millions more people are potentially going to be killed.”
A long war that threatens Europe’s food and fuel supplies would hurt the United States, too, threatening to send inflation spiraling even higher than its recent 40-year high of more than 8%, Reed added.
Moreover, Reed said the current conflict is a “proxy war” masking a growing conflict between the free world — led by the U.S. — and two powerful totalitarian states: Russia and China.
Calling Vladimir Putin’s Russia “this monster of an adversary,” Reed said: “He needs to understand that we are here to defend freedom. We are here to defend democracy. And most importantly, we are here to defend the Ukrainian people that are fighting for their lives, for their country.”
The top Democrat on the bipartisan trip to Europe — House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland — agreed. In a speech in Copenhagen during the trip, Hoyer said that a Russian victory would embolden tyrants worldwide.
“If we can hold firm now, though — if Putin is forced to walk away bruised and empty-handed, facing charges of war crimes and with a shattered economy and degraded military — other despots will think twice before copying his playbook,” Hoyer said.
Asked if the U.S. and other NATO countries should be doing more to help Ukraine, Reed said he would defer to President Biden and U.S. military officials to decide exactly what the nation’s response to the Russian attack should be.
Reed and his traveling companions also got to witness the refugee crisis that has unfolded in Poland as the war has driven an estimated 4.3 million Ukrainians to flee for other countries.
“The picture of war that people have in their minds, we saw firsthand,” Reed said. “We saw people walking 50-60 miles to that point of entry into Poland, and we embraced them. The Polish people have been amazing. They’ve opened their homes to those refugees.”
Reed stressed, though, that the picture of war that people have in their minds is not the complete picture. The complete picture, he stressed, is the larger battle between freedom and tyranny that the war in Ukraine represents.
“The point here is something much bigger than what you may see on the news,” he added.
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