Biden’s $60 billion plan for Ukraine: prolong the war through 2024 .
As US weapons shipments to Ukraine dry up, Biden's $60 billion request faces new hurdles in Washington.
Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration has repeatedly vowed that it would support Kyiv “as much as it takes, for as long as it takes.” As the war’s two-year anniversary approaches, that mantra has been quietly retired. The United States, President Biden said last month, will support Ukraine “for as long as we can.”
Biden’s shift comes amid a standoff with Congressional Republicans, who have demanded that the White House accept further border militarization and asylum restrictions in exchange for his requested $60 billion in Ukraine aid. Yet even as the White House has tried to play ball, House Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested that no amount of border concessions could unlock the money for Ukraine. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a staunch ally of Biden’s on Ukraine, is now hintingthat a deal over the border and Ukraine may be impossible during this election year.
The White House, Johnson says, must detail its “endgame” and “strategy” to ensure “Ukraine would not be another Afghanistan.” For his part, McConnell would be fine with another Afghanistan. “I think Afghanistan was a big success,” McConnell retorted, faulting only Biden’s hasty withdrawal in 2021. Yet without more money, McConnell and his White House allies will not able to replicate their “success” in Ukraine.
“Look, there’s no magic pot of money,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken complained this month. “If we don’t get that money, it’s a real problem.” With no more funds to draw on, the White House recently announced that US assistance to Ukraine has “ground to a halt.” This halt, a Pentagon spokesperson explained this week, “prevents us from meeting the most urgent battlefield needs,” including “artillery rounds, anti-tank weapons, air defense interceptors.”
The freeze on US funding comes as Ukraine finds itself “in a perilous position,” the New York Times reports. Soldiers are “exhausted by long stretches of combat and shorter rest periods,” while the overall ranks have been “thinned by mounting casualties” and only “partly replenished, often with older and poorly trained recruits.” According to one Ukrainian soldier fighting southwest of Avdiivka: “Three out of ten soldiers who show up are no better than drunks who fell asleep and woke up in uniform.”
To make up for its shortfalls, Ukraine is now debating lowering the age of conscription to draft some 500,000 new soldiers and urging European countries to help repatriate military-age men. On Wednesday, Ukraine suffered a new tragedy, and humiliation, when its forces were accused of shooting down a Russian military plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war. The strike reportedly killed all 74 people on board, including 65 captive Ukrainians who were set to be freed in a prisoner swap.
In the uncertainty over the US commitment, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has the most to lose. Much like Biden seeks to trade harsh anti-immigration measures to be able to prolong the proxy war, Zelensky opted to receive global celebrity and tens of billions of dollars in NATO weaponry in exchange for shunning opportunities to both prevent the Russian invasion and end it after it began – thereby handing his Washington sponsors an opportunity to “weaken” Russia.
“I am sure that the United States of America will not betray us and that what we agreed with the United States will be fully implemented,” Zelensky told reporters last month. But whether he was sincere or not then, Zelensky is clearly not so sure anymore. A Ukrainian military official told Politico that some government colleagues are prepared to “blame our most confident allies that we cannot win this war because of them.” This includes Zelensky, who, amid declining popularity, “will desperately look for options of whom to blame.”
“I feel sorry for him,” a senior European diplomat told the Washington Post following Zelenky’s most recent US visit. “It didn’t change anything. It can’t have been good for his spirit.” A Congressional aide described the Ukrainian president as “understandably dispirited,” who “just didn’t have that normal zest.”
That declining zest is understandable: long promised an “ironclad” commitment from the White House, the Ukrainian government is now forced to plead for a life raft. “I just want to be honest with you: I think everyone thinks Ukraine is winning. We’re going to lose without you,” Sasha Ustinova, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, recently told US lawmakers. “Ukraine will not make it without the support of the world and especially the United States.” Speaking to the Financial Times, a Western official working on Ukraine policy concurs: “It’s probably fair to say that the Ukrainian system is entirely dependent on the continued military assistance from the west.”
Ukrainian officials must not only beg for money, but hawk their willingness to sacrifice their people. At the recent Davos gathering of the globe elite, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stressed to Western donors that by using Ukraine to fight Russia, “you save lives of your soldiers.” Therefore, “we kind of offer the best deal on [the] global market of security: give us the weapons, give us the money, and we will finish the job.”
A win for all, except those Ukrainian soldiers and their loved ones, obligated to pay the cost of their lives for the best deal in the global market of security.
Just as the Ukrainian government understandably fears for its survival, the Biden administration has similar concerns. With Congress stalling Biden’s $60 billion funding request, “a grim realization has settled in for the administration,” CNN reports. The administration’s pitch to trade border militarization for Ukraine money “is likely the last chance for any new US military funding” for the proxy war “before the 2024 presidential election.”
There is no indication here that Biden and his aides are feeling “grim” about the tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives that they’ve sacrificed for their goal of weakening Russia, nor the prospect of many more deaths. They’re instead feeling grim at the growing possibility that the money for their pet proxy war will run out before they are forced to make their case for re-election – a case that would seemingly include their signature foreign policy of arming Ukraine and blocking multiple diplomatic opportunities to the end the war.
The need to lock in Ukraine funding is not just driven by Biden’s political ambitions, but to safeguard the proxy war should enough voters choose to not re-elect him. According to CNN, administration and congressional officials have been discussing “how to channel as much aid to Ukraine as possible before January 2025,” when a new president might take office. “Aside from there being a desperate need, getting as much aid in before January 2025 is on the minds of a lot of folks I’ve spoken to,” a US official explained. “Not only is it important that the monies get appropriated, but that they get disbursed before the election as any FY24 funds still waiting to be spent can get blocked by Trump.”
“We’re in the middle of an intense election cycle, where taking a tough vote like this in the shadow of presidential and down-ballot elections is a nonstarter for a lot of people,” a Congressional aide adds. Therefore, “for the hawks among us” on Capitol Hill, “frontloading [Ukraine funding] is the way to sustain support through what is going to be a politically intense year on the home front.”
In other words, while claiming to fight Russia to “defend democracy,” the Biden administration is in fact desperate to protect that fight from democracy. In this case, that means blocking the potential policy shift of a duly elected successor, and avoiding the “tough” act of defending the current policy before voters – an obvious nonstarter for committed Washington hawks.
To convince Republicans, Biden’s aides have delivered dire warnings that, absent more US funding, “Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks — months at best,” NBC News reports. And if the US fails to support Ukraine, the message that the US is unreliable “will reverberate around the world.” Blinken has also attempted to market the war as a Neoconservative New Deal. “Here’s the thing, of that money that we’re asking for, $50 billion gets spent right back in the United States on that money to procure items for Ukraine’s defense,” Blinken said in Davos. “It’s made in America. These are American jobs.”
If Blinken and his colleagues were truly committed to the American worker, there are multiple ways to create jobs without building more weapons for a futile proxy war. The same goes for Ukraine. If the White House were truly committed to Ukraine’s long-term future, it might engage with the multiple diplomatic openings that it has heretofore shunned, rather than try to prolong the carnage until after US voters get to render their verdict.