Kathrine Frich
This comes after Trump’s emissary calls Putin a “humanitarian”
History leaves deep scars across Europe, and old wartime playbooks rarely stay buried forever.
Right now, a bitter dispute is unfolding in Washington over how to describe a foreign leader’s latest campaign.
What started with a polite compliment has quickly turned into a rare moment of bipartisan fury.
Echoes of the Blitz
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, according to the Kyiv Post.
As winter approaches, Moscow has been firing attack drones and ballistic missiles at Ukraine’s power grid, transport links, and homes. Shaheen warned that the goal is to crush everyday people’s spirits, much like Nazi Germany’s 1940 Blitz bombing campaign against Britain.
“Putin’s tactics have changed from using WWI-style tactics on the front lines to attacking major metropolitan areas in the country to undermine morale,” Shaheen said, as reported by the Kyiv Post. “It’s the same tactic Hitler used in Britain before WWII, and targeting the country’s energy infrastructure.”
Following an October 19 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the senator pushed back against any steps that might hand Moscow extra cash for its war effort.
“Putin only responds to strength,” she said in a statement cited by the Kyiv Post, urging leaders to pile pressure on the Kremlin instead of Kyiv.
Outrage over envoy
Her sharp warning landed alongside wider congressional anger aimed at US envoy Steve Witkoff.
During a Wednesday meeting in St. Petersburg, Witkoff thanked the Russian leader for freeing 74-year-old American prisoner Stephen Hubbard after more than four years in detention, the Kyiv Post reported. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that,” Witkoff told Putin.
Shaheen rejected that praise, calling the Russian president a dictator and a war criminal who has killed thousands of Ukrainians, while noting that Hubbard should never have been locked up at all. Republican lawmakers were just as furious, according to the Kyiv Post.
“WTF, Steve? Look up the definition of ‘humanitarian,'” Republican Senator Thom Tillis wrote on X, calling the remarks outrageous and telling the envoy to ask grieving Ukrainian families whose children were killed or abducted how they see Putin.
Other Republicans piled on quickly. Senator John Cornyn dismissed the envoy’s praise entirely. “No. Putin is a stone cold killer,” Cornyn wrote, as quoted by the Kyiv Post.
Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Don Bacon branded the comment “another embarrassment,” and Senator Joni Ernst dismissed the humanitarian label by pointing to Russia’s ongoing strikes on civilians.
