Hours after Congress passed a U.S. spending bill without additional funding for Ukraine — in order to avoid a government shutdown — President Joe Biden urged House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to follow up quickly with support.
“I fully expect the speaker to keep his commitment to secure passage and support needed to help Ukraine as they defend themselves against aggression and brutality,” Biden said Sunday at the White House. “There’s an overwhelming number of Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate who support Ukraine. Let’s vote on it.”
The spending fight in Washington comes at a critical stage in Ukraine’s war to repel Russia’s invasion. Kyiv has stepped up missile and drone attacks on Russian-occupied Crimea, targeting bases and supply lines as the four-month old counteroffensive makes halting progress on the ground.
But fresh assistance isn’t certain and becoming more difficult to achieve particularly as issues like U.S. border security come to the forefront.
On Saturday, Congress passed a bipartisan measure that would keep the U.S. government funded until Nov. 17 with $16 billion in disaster funding. However, the lack of $6 billion in Ukraine aid is a blow to Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who last month visited Washington to plead for new weapons systems. Zelenskyy has urged allies to keep up their financial and military support for Kyiv.
Asked what he would say to Zelenskyy and other allies of Ukraine, Biden said, “I can reassure them. Look at me: We are going to get it done.”
Senate leaders have said they would begin work to approve aid.
“In the coming weeks, we expect the Senate will work to ensure the U.S. government continues to provide critical and sustained security and economic support for Ukraine,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement Saturday with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.
But McCarthy wants to link aid for Ukraine to Republican proposals for security at the U.S. border that are opposed by Democrats, saying the border is “the priority for me” and the two policies should be dealt with jointly.
“I support being able to make sure that Ukraine has the weapons that they need, but I firmly support the border first,” McCarthy said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “So we’ve got to find a way we can do this together.”
Ukraine is “not going to get some big package if the border is not secure” and the White House should be aware of that, he said, citing a House-passed border bill that hasn’t become law.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, called the omission of aid for Ukraine “a decision that we have to regret.”
Yet Biden’s calls for Congress to provide funding separately offer “hope that this will not be a definitive decision and Ukraine will continue having the support of the U.S.,” Borrell said at a news conference in Kyiv.
The bipartisan deal on short-term government funding avoided a shutdown that threatened to hit the U.S. economy.
A funding breach would have halted many federal functions and paychecks, while economists predicted a longer shutdown could impede the Federal Reserve’s efforts to counter inflation without widespread job losses. Markets were on alert to any actions from credit-rating firms just months after Fitch Ratings stripped the U.S. of its top-tier rating, citing persistent concerns about U.S. governance.
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