Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie recently introduced an amendment to the 2024 defense policy bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which “requires a report on the casualty and equipment losses for both sides involved in the conflict in Ukraine.”

In the house version of the NDAA, the 2023 amendments were accepted. Currently, the NDAA is being reviewed by the Senate.

In a recent interview with foreign policy reporter Aaron Sobczak of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Massie talked about why he put forward this amendment in 2024. For perspective, Massie almost got a similar amendment passed in the 2023 NDAA bill .

Massie listed out several factors that prompted him to put forward the amendment. For example, he cited how House Speaker Mike Johnson was not aware of the number of Ukrainians who have been killed or wounded in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and that State Department officials seemed to know just the  Russian casualty figures but curiously didn’t know the figures for Ukraine’s casualties.

During the interview, Massie stated, “a classified briefing, I stood up and asked what the casualties were on the Ukrainian side, and in that meeting I believe, you had representatives from the intelligence community, and they were briefing us, and they went out of their way to tell us how many Russian casualties there were, and they would not answer my question of how many Ukrainian casualties there were.”

“So then a few months later, I’m in the Speaker’s office, and I asked the Speaker if he knew the number of casualties in Ukraine? He began telling me how many Russian casualties there were. I said, Do you know how many Ukrainian casualties there are? And he said, No. I said, Have they ever told you? And he said, No. I said, Have you ever asked? He said, I should ask. So the Speaker of the House doesn’t even know. Didn’t even know at the time how many casualties there were,” Massie added.

The whole folly that is the US’s proxy war in Ukraine has to be exposed. Masise’s proposal is a good first step in ending this disastrous conflict, which the US has bankrolled and flooded weapons into since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The #1 priority for the foreign policy realists in the America First crowd is to get as many congressmen aligned with Massie’s views elected to Congress so that a foreign policy of restraint is finally implemented in DC.