Without an agreement in Congress, American military aid to Ukraine could quickly end. A crucial issue for the Ukrainian armed forces as the approaching winter has frozen the front. Time is of the essence, warns the White House.
“We are running out of money and soon we are running out of time.” Joe Biden’s entourage sounded the alarm on Monday about American military aid to Ukraine and threatened if parliamentarians did not vote on new funds before the end of the year.
“I want to be clear: If Congress does not act by the end of the year, we will run out of resources to deliver more weapons and equipment to Ukraine,” White House Budget Director Shalanda Young wrote in a letter to the chairman of the House House of Representatives with Republican majority. “There are no magic remedies to address the emergency.”
Eliminating U.S. weapons and equipment would undermine Ukraine’s war effort
Eliminating U.S. weapons and equipment would undermine Ukraine’s war effort
Shalanda Young
At stake is an extraordinary amount of more than $100 billion that Democratic President Joe Biden requested from Congress on October 20 to respond to today’s greatest emergencies: helping Israel and Ukraine, China to confront and respond to the arrival of migrants at the southern border.
“A disruption in the arrival of American weapons and equipment would devastate Ukraine’s war effort,” the budget director assures in this urgent letter, “it would jeopardize Ukraine’s progress and increase the likelihood of Russian victories,” while the US military supplies have already declined .
Parliamentary blockade
The United States, the leading donor of military aid to Ukraine, is facing its biggest budget crisis in months due to endless parliamentary turmoil. The Congress of the world’s leading power has still not voted on a final budget for the fiscal year that began on October 1st. The federal government is currently working thanks to an emergency extension that expires in mid-January.
The debates in the House of Representatives are likely to be difficult: A handful of Republican elected officials, despite being very supportive of Israel, want to cut military aid to Kiev. Other conservative parliamentarians are calling for a significant tightening of American migration policy in return for their vote for the Ukraine package.
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Kiev has feared a slowdown in international aid for several weeks, with Western public attention now focused on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The eastern and southern fronts appear to be frozen for the winter, a period that Russian forces are expected to use, as they did last year, to use their air advantage to attack Ukrainian infrastructure.
F.Se with AFP