U.S. Budget Deal Has Europe Questioning American Resolve on Ukraine

When the U.S. Congress frantically passed an eleventh-hour deal to avert a government shutdown, it did so at the expense of one of President Joe Biden’s top foreign-policy priorities: U.S. aid for Ukraine.

The stopgap deal to keep funding the U.S. government for six weeks came only after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy jettisoned $6 billion in additional aid for Ukraine—aid the far-right minority of House Republicans opposed—to push the deal through.

Congress is slated to hash out new negotiations on a separate funding package for Ukraine in the future, and a large majority of both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill still support sending more U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Yet there’s a growing sense of unease settling into the national security establishment in Washington as well as Kyiv over the saga. Many officials on both sides of the Atlantic view the U.S. government shutdown saga as a sign of the United States’ fading resolve to back Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s full-scale and genocidal invasion.

“We cannot, under any circumstances, allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” Biden said ahead of the deal to avert the government shutdown.

How the political battles in Washington shake out could have existential consequences for Ukraine, which has received around $44 billion in U.S. military aid, according to data from the State Department—more than seven times Kyiv’s prewar defense budget—since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, its second invasion of the country in the last decade.

The highly anticipated Ukrainian spring counteroffensive has largely bogged down in a thicket of dense Russian defensive lines, with limited breakthroughs that preview a long war ahead. Russia is ramping up its production of artillery and other munitions, while Ukraine needs more firepower from the West, particularly the United States, as European defense industries lag behind in coming online after decades of sluggish defense spending.

All the while, Ukrainian officials watch nervously from afar as high-stakes political dealmaking in Washington on aid to Kyiv makes or breaks their ability to wage war.

“We feel hostage to the internal political struggle in the United States,” said Yehor Cherniev, a Ukrainian lawmaker who serves on the country’s National Security Committee. “[I]f assistance is delayed, this will mean a sharp drop in our firepower and an increase in casualties.”

Ukraine’s supporters say the skepticism taking root in some wings of the Republican Party plays into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands and will ultimately undercut Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and lead to more instability in Europe. They argue that for a pittance—a tiny fraction of the annual U.S. defense budget and with zero Americans put in harm’s way—Ukraine is helping to decimate the military of one of the United States’ top geopolitical rivals.

“We are worried about general fatigue on some allied countries, including Hungary and the latest elections in Slovakia,” said Artis Pabriks, a former Latvian defense minister. “Latvia strongly believes that support to Ukraine against totalitarian invasion cannot be used and misused in national politics.

“Russians see that hoping for favorable election results next year, and it makes them continue war, at least until elections. If, on the top of that, there is still weakness of support, it encourages them to continue war and endanger the whole West.”

Russia has suffered an estimated 300,000 casualties and lost more than 6,700 tanks and 180 fighter jets and helicopters in the 20 months since it launched its so-called “special military operation” to topple the government in Kyiv, an operation that planners in the Kremlin expected to take just a matter of days. Since then, the war has bogged down into a grueling war of attrition. While Ukraine has more effective military capabilities and massive tranches of Western military aid on its side, Russia has power in mass and numbers. Ukraine has an estimated 500,000 total military personnel, including active soldiers and reserve forces, compared with Russia’s 1.3 million, according to analysts.

Opponents of further aid argue that the United States has already given billions of dollars in economic assistance and weapons to Ukraine and say it is time to reallocate government resources to problems closer to home, such as the southern border and gearing up for a new geopolitical showdown against China.

And that argument has picked up as political gravity has begun to weigh on Ukraine’s campaign to beat back Russia’s full-scale invasion, leaving European officials privately worried that the beginning of the 2024 election season is going to be an inflection point for the historic levels of U.S. military aid to Kyiv.

“‘As long as it takes’ as the correct and consistent approach was clearly questioned by the Republicans,” said a German official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about another country’s internal political deliberations. “This certainly casts down on our collective Western resolve.”

With its power over government funding, Congress can make or break the future of U.S. aid to Ukraine, seen as one of the most critical parts of Ukraine’s strategy to defeat the Russian invasion. Beyond the historic levels of military aid to Ukraine, the United States is currently spending nearly $3 billion to prop up Ukraine’s defense industry and helping to bridge its budget shortfall while providing humanitarian and energy aid.

“There is still a broad bipartisan consensus around continued support for Ukraine, but the skeptical voices on Capitol Hill are loud,” said Rachel Rizzo, an expert on defense issues at the Atlantic Council. “The recent infighting within the Republican Party shows that a small but boisterous coterie of detractors can really stymie progress.”

McCarthy has said he supports increasing U.S. funding for Ukraine but has to listen to the demands of his caucus to first secure funding for the southern border with Mexico. Ukraine retains broad bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, including from powerful Republican lawmakers such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But those trend lines are shifting.

“An up or down vote would overwhelmingly pass, but within the GOP caucus there is a split,” said Peter Rough, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “The stakes are high, though. Europeans insist that the U.S. is the essential member of the coalition for Ukraine. So any sign that security assistance might not be forthcoming from Washington does raise alarm bells.”

Experts and analysts believe the fight over Ukraine aid, led by skeptics such as Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs, is gaining traction as U.S. public opinion polls show voters’ enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine slowly waning over time.

“Putin is getting under the Americans’ skin,” said a Lithuanian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to offer criticism of internal U.S. politics. “It’s very sad to see some U.S. politicians so shortsighted waiting for the next Pearl Harbor to happen in Europe or the Indo-Pacific.”

One bellwether of this trend is how failed efforts in the House to cut Ukraine aid have slowly gained supporters over time. When Gaetz introduced a measure in July to cut aid to Ukraine, he netted just 70 votes in support. When he introduced a similar measure during the height of the government shutdown debate last week, 93 Republican lawmakers supported it—though 126 Republicans and all 213 Democrats voted against it.

Since the war began, the United States has pledged about $75 billion in aid to Ukraine, of which around $44 billion is military aid. The military aid constitutes around 3.4 percent of U.S. spending on the Pentagon.

In another possible sign of weakening Western resolve for Ukraine, a populist party headed by a politician seen as pro-Russia won the most votes in national elections in Slovakia on Sunday. Robert Fico, a former Slovakian prime minister, has been asked to form a new coalition government, beating out the pro-Western and liberal Progressive Slovakia party in an election that could further undermine European Union and NATO resolve for Ukraine on the other side of the Atlantic. Neighboring EU and NATO member Hungary, led by Russia-friendly leader Viktor Orban, has stymied progress on expanding EU sanctions on Russia and starting talks to bring Ukraine into the EU.

Back in Washington, multiple congressional aides said McCarthy now has more room for maneuver after surviving the shutdown threat. Some downplayed the lingering threat to U.S. aid to Ukraine from the small faction of Republican lawmakers who led the charge against it.

“[M]ost of their members care way more about the border and spending cuts than about cutting Ukraine aid,” one congressional aide said, on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the internal negotiations. “[A]ll they ‘got’ in the [continuing resolution] was no Ukraine spending, which everyone knows will likely be passed anyway.” The logic from pro-Ukraine members of Congress and their staff is that enough political will exists for a separate aid bill.

“We have a procedural problem, not a vote count problem,” the aide added.

The Biden administration can still pull about $5 billion in weapons off Pentagon shelves from the so-called presidential drawdown authority previously approved by Congress, and Ukraine is still waiting for billions of dollars in pre-announced deliveries from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, the U.S. fund that can source weapons orders for Kyiv from U.S. defense contractors.

Ukrainian officials and experts have sought to couch Congress’s move as a blip, not a systemic change. But the frustration from Kyiv was palpable.

“I can tell you what my reaction is,” said Daria Kaleniuk, a co-founder and the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv. “A mix of betrayal and disappointment.”