Senate Republican Waffles on Criticizing Putin — Before NBC’s Welker Confronts Him with Other GOP Senators Trashing Him as a ‘War Criminal’

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) declined to designate Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” during a Sunday interview with NBC News and was confronted with comments from his Republican Senate colleagues blasting the Russian president.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, anchor Kristen Welker opened her interview with the Oklahoma Republican by asking him to acknowledge that Putin was at the very least “responsible for starting the war in Ukraine.”

The request followed a week in which President Donald Trump and White House officials began to push an alternate narrative on the three-year war in Eastern Europe – that Kyiv was either outright responsible for Russia’s invasion or could have prevented it.

Mullin repeated Trump’s claims that the war would have been averted had he been in office and that the war needed to end, even if Kyiv needed to make concessions.

With the senator hesitant to criticize Putin, Welker reminded him that in February 2022, he called Putin’s invasion “unjustified and unprovoked.”

Welker then aired clips of Sens. Roger Wicker (R-MS) John Kennedy (R-LA), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) referring to Putin as everything from a “war criminal” who should be “executed” to a “cancer.”

Kennedy previously said Putin made “Jeffrey Dahmer look like Mother Theresa.”

Welker asked Mullin to respond to the comments about Putin from his GOP Senate colleagues.

She asked, “Senator, is it important for the president of the United States, who speaks for all of the country, to be honest and critical of Vladimir Putin?” Mullin declined to accuse Putin of war crimes in his response:

I think the president’s been very critical of Putin. And I’m not sitting here defending Putin. Putin’s not a good guy. At the same time, that’s up to the Russian people. That’s not up to us to make that decision. What President Trump is trying to do is end the war.

And he’s trying to end the war from a place of strength. You don’t end a war from a place of weakness, which is why Biden could never end the war. Trump is going to be able to end the war. He said he was going to do it when he was on the campaign trail, and he’s kept his promises, and he’s going to continue to deliver on those promises.

Watch above via NBC News.