Washington’s next test: Funding Ukraine to stop Putin
It’s been ugly, but a Congress split between Democratic and Republican control has finally done its most basic job, which is funding the government. Now the question is whether it can do anything beyond the bare minimum.
There’s a lot of unfinished business in Washington, but the most pressing need may be more aid for Ukraine in its battle for survival against Russian invaders. And there are tantalizing hints from House Speaker Mike Johnson that Congress might finally be edging close to thinking about eventually doing something — just as Ukraine's defenses are beginning to slip.
The United States has provided about $42 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. That’s more than any other country. But Congress has approved no new aid since last summer, and the logjam in Washington has left Ukraine short of crucial weapons it needs to hold off Russian advances on the frontlines and protect Ukrainian cities from repeated onslaughts of missiles, bombs, and drones.
After early setbacks, Russia has cranked up defense production, imported weaponry from Iran and North Korea, and flung hundreds of thousands of new troops into the fight. Despite sanctions, Russia is earning plenty of money from oil sales, its main source of revenue, which keeps its war machinery humming.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has gambled all along that Russia can outlast Ukraine and its Western allies, and recent efforts by some Republicans in the House of Representatives to block more US aid seem to be proving him right. If Putin prevails in Ukraine, he’ll gain a new foothold for threatening the West and demonstrate to other dictators with territorial ambitions that belligerence pays.
Speaker Johnson has finally indicated that he plans to counter Putin and support some kind of bill to aid Ukraine. The Senate already passed a bill that would provide $60 billion for Ukraine — in line with President Biden’s requests — along with other money for Israel and humanitarian aid in Gaza. Johnson says his conservative coalition in the House won’t pass the Senate bill, and it’s not clear what Johnson could get past a flank of extreme conservative Republicans opposed to more aid.
But there are a few arcane maneuvers that could allow a bill to pass, as Punchbowl News recently explained. The main trick is getting a bill through House procedures to the floor for a vote, since nearly all Democrats and some Republicans support aid to Ukraine, more than enough for a bill to pass. The problem for Johnson is that passing a bill with Democratic support could be the very thing that propels conservatives to end his speakership after less than a year. Johnson banked on Democratic support to maneuver the final government funding bill to passage, and that prompted firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to threaten a move to oust Johnson.
The ongoing fratricide among Republicans leaves a mixed outlook for if or when the House might pass Ukraine aid and how much it might approve. Greg Valliere of AGF Investments recently wrote that “if this Johnson-Democrat alliance holds up, the next move — by early April — would be a deal that grants close to $60 billion in aid to Ukraine.”
Others are more skeptical. “The US Ukraine aid package remains marooned in Congress,” Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners explained in a March 26 research note. “We have low-to-moderate conviction that something can get done this April-May, but we doubt the full request or Senate version is passed and enacted.”
While Ukraine aid is a political football in Washington, it’s literally a matter of life and death on Ukraine’s battlefields. “Ukraine is bleeding,” former diplomats Ivo Daalder and Karen Donfried wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. “Without new US military assistance, Ukrainian ground forces may not be able to hold the line against a relentless Russian military.”
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Steven Pifer and John Herbst of the Atlantic Council recently visited Ukraine and reported that dwindling American aid “has had an impact on the battlefield,” including “higher Ukrainian casualties.” Where Ukraine once had near parity with Russia in terms of available ammunition, it now faces a 10-to-1 deficit in artillery shells. There may also be acute shortages of air defense ammunition and other crucial weaponry.
Critics of aid to Ukraine argue that America should take care of its own problems before spending money on somebody else’s. But that’s a false choice and bogus logic. The United States can and does fund many things at once. Republicans initially wanted new legislation to strengthen border control as a condition of more aid for Ukraine, but they changed their minds and voted down their own border bill in February.
The American interest in helping Ukraine is putting a check on Russian aggression and sapping the military and economic strength of what may be the world’s most troublesome nation. American taxpayers provide more than $800 billion every year for national defense. A chunk of that money is targeted at containing Russia and preparing to defeat Russia in a war if it ever comes to that.
Aid for Ukraine has been a small fraction of US defense spending, as the chart below shows. In 2022, total US defense spending was $812 billion, while military aid to Ukraine was $46 billion, or just 5.6% of defense spending. And that Ukraine aid directly weakens one of America’s main military competitors, with Ukrainians doing the fighting and dying, instead of Americans.
Of the $60 billion Biden wants for Ukraine in 2024, at least one-third, or $20 billion, would actually go to American defense firms that would basically sell materiel to the US government, which the United States would then send to Ukraine. That supports American jobs. Much of the rest would go to the training of Ukrainian troops and weapons purchases from other sources. The United States is not sending bags of cash to Ukraine for authorities there to spend as they see fit.
While momentum has shifted recently in Russia’s favor, Putin’s forces are sacrificing massive numbers of troops to take small tracts of land. Ukraine isn’t advancing, but it isn’t capitulating either. Ukraine has scored meaningful wins by sinking Russian ships with drones and attacking Russian oil refineries, which could crimp domestic energy supplies. There’s still time for Western aid to make a decisive difference in the war.
And if the best possible outcome is a long slog for Russia in a war it can’t win but can’t extricate itself from, that would be money well spent too.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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