- Republicans have been blocking new aid to Ukraine, hoping to force a deal with Biden.
- US and Western aid has been vital to Ukraine’s war effort and existential fight against Russia.
- If aid stops, Ukraine will lose, the White House and experts say.
Republicans have been holding new US aid to Ukraine hostage, hoping to secure political wins while Kyiv struggles in an existential fight against Russia.
And as time runs out for a deal, the White House, Ukraine, and experts have all been sounding the alarm, arguing that if the well runs dry, Ukraine will lose the war.
This past week, President Joe Biden sought break the congressional impasse on a roughly $111 billion assistance package to Ukraine and Israel, saying he was willing to “make significant compromises on the border,” an issue Republicans have insisted on pairing with the foreign aid. There has not been any movement yet, and Russia is quite pleased.
GOP negotiators have demanded stricter immigration policies inconsistent with the current administration’s agenda, but with Ukraine’s war being a major aspect of Biden’s foreign policy, Democrats and the White House could be forced to concede.
While the focus is on the border, the GOP’s push against aid reflects a growing sentiment among Republican voters. A Pew Research Center survey conducted from late November to early December and published last week shows that 48%, or nearly half, of Republicans and Republican-leading independents think the US is giving Ukraine too much money.
It’s a troubling and politicized situation, with just a handful of political figures holding Ukraine’s fate in their hands.
The situation is so dire, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is making a last-minute trip to Washington DC on Tuesday to advocate for more support. He’ll be meeting with both Biden and Congressional leaders.
While negotiations have stalled, the White House has warned that failure to approve more aid by the end of 2023 could be catastrophic for Ukraine. “We cannot let Putin win,” Biden said, adding that if Russia takes Ukraine, Moscow “will keep going.”
Experts, too, have expressed concerns, highlighting the severity of the situation.
“If the West cuts aid to Ukraine, Russia will win,” George Barros, a top conflict watcher and the geospatial-intelligence team lead and a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Business Insider.
Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images
While a group of partner nations, consisting mostly of NATO members, contribute to Ukrainian aid, the US sends the lion’s share and has often been influential in leading the pack. But support for Kyiv among all partner nations has severely dropped since August 2023, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy Ukraine support tracker.
“Newly committed aid has reached a new low between August to October 2023—an almost 90 percent drop compared to the same period in 2022. Ukraine now increasingly relies on a core group of donors such as the US, Germany, and the Nordic and Eastern European countries that continue to pledge and deliver both financial aid and important weaponry, such as F-16 fighter jets,” the institute wrote in a recent update.
Ukraine and Russia are currently in an unstable stalemate. Both sides have been fighting a war of attrition for months, requiring ample manpower, ammunition, and resources to keep chipping away. Ukraine remains severely outmatched. It lacks the manpower, firepower, and money to keep going at the rate it needs to, but it is holding out, often beating the odds as it has been since the start of the war. But there’s no guarantee that will continue without further support.
With Ukraine’s counteroffensive coming to an end and its stated goals not accomplished, there are questions about what it will need to keep fighting through the winter.
“The positional war in Ukraine is not a stable stalemate,” Barros explained.
“It is not the result of fundamental realities in modern warfare that can only be changed with a technological or tactical revolution, as was the First World War’s stalemate,” he said. “Neither does it rest on a permanent parity in military capacity between Russia and Ukraine that will continue indefinitely regardless of Western support to Kyiv.”
The current condition is caused by limitations on both sides: The West’s self-imposed limitations on what it’ll send to Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hesitation in fully committing Russian industry and society to the war effort.
“The current balance is thus, in fact, highly unstable, and could readily be tipped in either direction by decisions made in the West,” Barros told Business Insider.
Others have expressed similar sentiments. Over the weekend, Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska said the current state of the war is left to whether Western countries want to keep supporting Ukraine. “If the world gets tired, they will simply let us die,” she told BBC News.
