GOP's Tommy Tuberville: Putin is invading Ukraine because 'he can't feed his people' in 'communist' Russia

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) on Thursday made some geopolitically illiterate claims about Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

In an interview with 1819 News, Tuberville falsely claimed that Putin needed to steal Ukraine's farmland because he would otherwise be unable to feed the Russian people.

“He can’t feed his people,” the first-term Alabama senator said. “It’s a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.”

In fact, Russia has not been a communist country since the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and there is no evidence that Russia is facing a mass starvation crisis that would require it to invade a neighboring country.

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Elsewhere in the interview, Tuberville accused Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin of trying to make the American military "woke."

“I’m tired of hearing about ‘we need to change our military to where they’re woke,’” Tuberville said. "To where they need to listen to the federal government, and we need to educate them on things that have nothing to do with the military. Secretary Austin, we need a killing machine, not that we want to kill anybody, but people know that we will kill them if they come here and if they mess with us.”