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Orlando, FL — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Hannity to discuss the latest on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. See below for excerpts and watch the full interview here.

On whether the invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided by making concessions:
 
“It’s become popular lately for people to go around saying if we had agreed not to let Ukraine join NATO (they were not going to join NATO), this would all have been avoided. That’s just fundamentally untrue; that’s just false. 
 
“Putin laid out his conditions, and … in addition to Ukraine never becoming part of NATO, one of those conditions was, he wanted every country that joined since 1997 out of NATO…. That’s Romania, that’s Lithuania, that’s all the Baltic States.
 
“He’s telegraphing his intent, which is not necessarily to govern those countries, but he wants them to look like Belarus, [which] has a government in place that responds to him under his sphere of influence. I think we need to make clear, and I think some of these troop deployments are making clear, that that’s not going to happen.”
 
On what gives Vladimir Putin leverage:
 
“Tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield is one [advantage], which is a Russian doctrine: to ‘escalate in order to de-escalate.’ The other is oil and natural gas; he has weaponized energy. 
 
“And to hear Joe Biden say, ‘It’s not our goal to disrupt the supply of Russian oil in the marketplace…’ [Our goal should not be] to disrupt it, [but] to displace it. If we ramped up American energy, if we did what Putin is doing, we could begin to chip away at that advantage and most certainly protect ourselves, which is our number one obligation. 
 
“Vladimir Putin understands American politics really well; this is his fifth American president, and here’s what he knows: Joe Biden won’t do that … because of The Squad, because of the radical Marxist Left, because of his political base, because of the Green New Deal. He also knows Europe isn’t going to be able to sustain sanctions against him, because when the oil prices and the gas prices go up, the people will be in the streets rebelling, and they’ll cave. He knows all of this because he watches it all very carefully.”
 
On how the Left’s radical climate agenda hurts America:
 
“[The far Left has] a radical agenda [to end domestic energy production]. And Europe made the same decision….
 
“The moment [Biden] stepped into office, I think within two days of being there, he canceled the Keystone pipeline, [issued] no more leases on federal lands, [and introduced] all kinds of new regulations that make it difficult to fully utilize our energy resources. John Kerry is out there saying, ‘I hope we don’t pay too much attention to this war because that means we’re not going to be getting attention paid to my climate emergency.’
 
“It’s almost like a religious zealotry, except their religion, their god, is all this climate change stuff. And the result is that we now have children in charge of these major geopolitical movements making silly, ridiculous decisions. Vladimir Putin doesn’t live in that world. He’s making calculated decisions, and our country’s being hurt by this.”