Why Biden is getting some praise from Republicans on his handling of Ukraine

A number of Republican lawmakers also have been giving Biden small doses of praise for how he’s handled sanctions, at least since the invasion began. Yet there are some Republicans trying to tease apart a relatively small aspect of Biden’s response — the United States’ reliance on Russian oil — to see if he could be politically vulnerable there.

“I think there’s broad support for the president in what he’s doing now,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week in a news conference. “Our biggest complaint is, what took him so long?”

“The President has successfully brought together our friends and allies to coordinate a unified and powerful response to Putin’s actions,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said in a statement after Biden’s State of the Union.

“Yes,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the top Republican on the House’s foreign affairs committee, when asked on CNN on Sunday if he agrees with Romney that Biden has successfully united allies against Russia, adding: “I have been critical, as you know, of this administration. But I would have to say, I would credit also all the NATO countries, not just one man.”

The bipartisan reaction to how Biden is handling this is all the more remarkable given fretting by Democrats before the invasion began that this tricky geopolitical crisis could make him even more vulnerable to Republican attacks.

If there’s one area where Republicans hope Biden has a weak spot on Ukraine, it’s on energy. A group aligned with former vice president Mike Pence, a likely 2024 presidential candidate, started running ads Monday attacking Biden for not ramping up oil and gas production back home, Axios reports. The ad will air against 16 House Democrats fighting for reelection, trying to tie them and Biden to inadvertently funding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Joe Biden caved to the radical environmentalists and stopped America’s Keystone Pipeline and dramatically increased Americans’ dependence,” the ad says. (The Keystone Pipeline, which would have piped Canadian oil into the United States, would not have made up the difference of Russian oil, experts say.)

Congressional Republicans trying to win back the majority in November use a tangentially related attack: They say if Biden hadn’t been so focused on reducing domestic production to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then Americans wouldn’t be paying so much, and wouldn’t be in a position to be dependent on other countries for their energy needs.

“Democrats put their radical environmental agenda first, no matter the cost to American families or our national security,” Congressional Leadership Fund press secretary Cally Perkins said in a statement.

“[I]t makes no sense whatsoever to continue to buy oil from Russia that they use to fund this war and this murderous campaign that they’re undertaking,” Rubio said Sunday on CNN, without explicitly criticizing the Biden administration.

It would be a powerfully symbolic action: a U.S. president hit in polling by inflation and rising gas prices willing to cut off a major nation’s oil supply. It might not have a drastic impact, though, both on Russia’s energy economy and U.S. prices.

As of 2021, Russia was the United States’ third-largest oil supplier, behind only Canada and Mexico, but it still doesn’t supply a huge chunk of the country’s international oil supply.

“If I’m being honest, it probably doesn’t have a big impact,” Nikos Tsafos, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Post’s Early 202.

It’s still early, but an NPR-PBS News Hour-Marist survey a week into the fighting in Ukraine found Biden’s approval rating jumping, with approval of his handling of Ukraine at 52 percent. A new Quinnipiac University poll also found improvement in how he’s handling Ukraine but found little improvement in his overall approval rating, though.

Republicans talking about the United States taking Russian oil could conceivably knock Biden down a peg, but it also could come at the cost of what has been so far a pretty united American front to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

This has been updated with the latest news. Caroline Anders contributed to this report.