Helping Kyiv means weakening ‘strategic adversary’ Russia, says Sen. Mitch McConnell
The U.S. Congress is expected to approve $20 billion in additional funding for Ukraine, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. The Republican senator from Kentucky claimed that Washington’s aid to kyiv was weakening Moscow. “without firing a shot.”
In a speech to the Senate, McConnell claimed that President Joe Biden “wasn’t as decisive as many of us would have liked” when it comes to funding Ukraine’s war effort, but that was no reason for Congress to “Agglomerate the failures of the administration with our own failures.”
“Helping Ukraine regain its territory means weakening one of America’s greatest strategic adversaries without firing a single shot,” argued the senator.
With Kyiv “eroding Russia’s ability to threaten NATO”, McConnell asserted, “Now is not the time to release the pressure” and with the unified NATO and European countries starting to spend money on their armies, “Now is definitely not the time to get wobbly.”
This particular phrase was made famous in 1990 by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who used it to urge US President George HW Bush to start a war against Iraq because of Kuwait.
McConnell also suggested that Congress would pass the additional government funding bill before the end of the month, which aims to avoid a government shutdown before the start of the new fiscal year in October.
The proposed spending bill bundles $20.1 billion for Ukraine and disaster relief in fire-hit Hawaii, despite objections from some Republicans who wanted to vote on the packages separately.
The US Congress has approved more than $130 billion in funds for Ukraine since February 2022. US aid to Kyiv included arms, equipment and ammunition, as well as cash transfers to pay officials’ salaries governmental.
When some Republicans tried to rein in the spending spree last December, McConnell insisted that helping Ukraine was the “America’s Number One Priority” and helped Democrats pass the 4,155-page omnibus spending bill.
