Republican Senator Corrected With Brutal Fact Check After Confusing Russia With Ukraine In Odd Comment On The War
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Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) tried to take a jab at Ukraine this week, but instead ended up on the receiving end of a brutal fact check after he confused the facts.
“The United States has sent $211 BILLION of your tax dollars to Ukraine, 4X as much as the rest of the world COMBINED,” Tuberville wrote on X.
The former college football coach was soon hit with a community note that read, “The $211 billion figure is the amount Russia has spent on the war as of February 2024. Senator Tuberville appears to have confused the United States with Russia.” The community note linked to a Reuters article that read, “Russia has probably spent up to $211 billion in equipping, deploying and maintaining its troops for operations in Ukraine and Moscow has lost more than $10 billion in canceled or postponed arms sales, a senior U.S. defense official said on Friday.”
BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh commented on Tuberville’s mistake, “It’s genuinely odd for a sitting US senator to be this wrong about such an important foreign policy issue.”
Tuberville has made several head-scratching comments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the past, including claiming that the “U.S. got Ukraine into this mess.”
In September of 2023, Tuberville told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, “This was not going to end up well for Ukraine. We pretty much kicked this can down the road and got Ukraine into this mess. We can’t get ’em out. Somebody needs to go to Russia, like Joe Biden, and talk them out of what’s going on and get this thing settled before we get into a world war.”
Tuberville has also doubted Russia’s Vladimir Putin wants to actually take any land from Ukraine, despite Russia’s staggering losses on the battlefield to hold Ukrainian territory. “He doesn’t want Ukraine. He doesn’t want Europe. Hell, he’s got enough land of his own. He just wants to make sure that he does not have United States weapons in Ukraine pointing at Moscow,” Tuberville told Steve Bannon in July.
