Putin Could Prevail if Ukraine Aid Cut

It was supposed to be a clarion call to re-energize flagging U.S. support for Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was meant to dial into a classified briefing to the entire U.S. Senate on Tuesday, alongside top Biden administration officials, urging the Senate to support the swift passage of a massive national security supplemental bill to keep the taps of U.S. military aid flowing to Ukraine. 

In the end, those best-laid plans devolved into yet another partisan fight on Capitol Hill.

Zelensky didn’t attend, according to congressional aides and former officials familiar with the matter, due to a last-minute scheduling conflict, and Senate Republicans walked out of the briefing early, fuming that the administration officials slated to brief them would only talk about Ukraine and Israel, and not the U.S. southern border—which was their top policy priority. While several top administration officials attended the briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversees U.S. border policy, did not, the aides and former officials said, incensing Republicans. 

The drama around this classified briefing encapsulates the political quagmire the Biden administration now faces, with massive implications for U.S. foreign policy and, in particular, Ukraine’s war against Russia. The Biden administration stitched together a major package of $111 billion to support Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and fund U.S. southern border security in a bid to get as many members of Congress as possible to support the measure. Instead, it’s devolved into a political headache, leaving continued aid for Ukraine hanging in the balance during a crucial phase in its war in Ukraine, all because of a partisan feud over U.S.-Mexico border policies. In a speech on Wednesday urging members of Congress to support further funding for Ukraine, President Joe Biden accused “extreme Republicans” of “playing chicken” with U.S. national security. 

“These are all political games,” said Luke Coffey, a national security expert at the Hudson Institute think tank. “Meanwhile, Ukrainians are dying, and funding is running dry.”

As of mid-November, the Pentagon had spent 97 percent of the $62 billion already earmarked for Ukraine, according to a starkly worded letter sent from the White House to congressional leaders on Monday. Military experts paint a bleak picture of what could happen next if the spigot of U.S. military aid is cut off. 

“We support Ukraine or Ukraine loses the war,” said Fred Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. “It really is that stark,” he said. 

In the first months of this renewed war, Russia seized 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, reaching the outskirts of the capital, Kyiv. Ukrainian forces have since waged a grinding battle to claw back towns and cities from Russian control. A collapse in U.S. support could unwind many of those hard-won gains. “If we cut Ukraine off and abandon Ukraine the way we abandoned Afghanistan, ultimately the same thing will happen,” Kagan said. 

The war has been characterized by pitched artillery battles. Feeding the Ukrainian military’s rapacious need for artillery shells has been a central component of U.S. support. If that funding is stopped, it would be quickly felt on the battlefield. “People cannot fight with their bare hands,” said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, the former Ukrainian minister of defense.

Another pillar of U.S. support has been air defense systems, which have protected Ukrainian cities from Russian missile and drone attacks. Late last month, Russia unleashed a swarm of 75 drones on Kyiv in the single-biggest drone attack of the war to date. All but one were shot down by the city’s air defense systems. A dwindling in air defense munitions could leave Ukraine’s troops, urban areas, and critical infrastructure exposed to a Russian onslaught from the skies. 

Russia watchers have long cautioned that, despite his forces’ underwhelming military performance, President Vladimir Putin believes he can bide his time and wait out Ukraine’s Western backers. The Russian leader has previously stated that Ukraine would not survive beyond “a week” if Western support were to dry up. 

In a call with the media on Tuesday, Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, cautioned that Putin’s military objectives in Ukraine remain unchanged. “Russia is still intending to continue to advance,” Sullivan said. “Its objectives in Ukraine are the full subjugation of that country, not just the taking of some territory in the south and the east,” he said. 

U.S. military aid to Ukraine far outstrips that provided by any other nation, and other Western states would be unable to fulfill the shortfall in the event that it is cut off. “I’ll be dialing for dollars and howitzers on a daily basis, but the bottom line is there is no substitute for the United States and what we can provide,” Sullivan said.

The U.S. has also played an important leadership role in organizing some 50 countries to provide aid to Kyiv through the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. As Washington has given increasingly powerful weapons to Ukraine, including Abrams battle tanks, it has given cover for European nations to follow suit. “The alliance is unlikely simply to trundle forward under its own steam as if we hadn’t been there,” Kagan said. “This will, of course, also be a massive betrayal of the allies who have also leaned forward in incurring Putin’s wrath,” he said. 

Foreign Policy interviewed 12 current and former officials, congressional aides, and experts on the ongoing political battles in Washington over the future of Ukraine aid and how the administration has linked it to funding for other national security priorities. One conclusion stands out above all others: There’s a palpable sense of dread among Ukraine’s biggest supporters in Washington and Europe.

Without continued U.S. military and economic aid for Kyiv, those supporters argue, Ukraine may not lose the war tomorrow, but it will undoubtedly tip the scale of the war in Russia’s favor. Biden administration officials and many members of Congress argue that Ukraine’s war is an existential struggle for peace in Europe: If Russia achieves a victory in Ukraine, it won’t stop there, and could invade U.S. allies on NATO’s eastern flank next. 

A small group of cautious Ukraine optimists inside the administration and Congress see the political battle over this funding package—around $111 billion in total—as a nasty procedural hurdle that congressional leaders will eventually sort out. The Democrats narrowly control the Senate, while Republicans narrowly control the House, so the politics was always going to be tricky, they argue, but Congress has overcome thorny political impasses before.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that House Republicans won’t greenlight Ukraine aid without a Republican-backed immigration bill, H.R. 2, included in the supplemental package. Democrats have resoundingly rejected H.R. 2, which would mirror Trump-era immigration policies, including border wall construction and curbing humanitarian parole programs for asylum-seekers. On the Senate side, even Republicans who are reliably pro-Ukraine have been unwilling to pass the supplemental until the Biden administration puts more security on the border.

“The mayors of our major cities have clearly indicated they do not have the capacity to take care of the refugees,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, speaking about those who arrive over the U.S. southern border. “This ought to be a no-brainer for the president in terms of the large, hugely Democratic big cities as well as the heartland.”

These cautiously optimistic officials and experts argue that Ukraine has one thing going in its favor: Nearly every senator and a vast majority of the members of the House on both sides of the aisle still support continuing U.S. military aid to Ukraine—as do a majority of American voters, according to some of the latest opinion polls.

Still, there’s a much larger contingent of pessimists, who view the partisan skirmishes in the Senate, and the impasse over the funding package, as an omen of how U.S. support for Ukraine could waver in the coming months and years. They point to the small flank of anti-Ukraine voices in the Republican Party that has been growing louder and more influential outside Washington; the fumbling by the Biden administration on rolling out the national security supplemental tying Ukraine aid to border security; and, above all, to the question of what will happen in the 2024 presidential election. 

“It is causing this gloom to descend across Europe and European capitals,” said Jim Townsend, a former top NATO policy official at the Pentagon. “They see this not as some tempest in a teapot or standard political fight in Congress, but as representative of where the U.S. is really going on foreign policy in the future.”

In a bid to marshal more support for Ukraine, Zelensky dispatched some of his top aides to Washington this week to pitch how critical U.S. support is to staving off a Russian victory. 

Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s presidential office, said that a postponement in U.S. aid would severely undermine Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territory and would create a “big risk” of Kyiv losing the war. “It will be difficult to keep in [the] same positions and for the people to really survive,” Yermak said in a speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington on Tuesday. Top Biden administration officials bluntly warned Congress that their ability to keep supplying Ukraine with weapons would dry up unless the emergency supplemental is passed.

“I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks,” Shalanda Young, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), wrote in a letter to congressional leaders this week. “There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money—and nearly out of time.”

There’s another growing fear about how this political battle could affect aid to Ukraine in the future, playing out in the background of the drama on Capitol Hill that many officials point to: the U.S. defense industrial base. 

A significant portion of the funds being held up are allocated to the U.S. defense industry to expand the production of U.S. munitions that can be sent to Ukraine to keep up the fight against Russia. The war has bogged down into what some analysts consider a stalemate, and both sides need immense supplies of artillery munitions in particular to keep up the fight. The U.S. Defense Department is now producing about 28,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition a month, according to the U.S. Army’s October numbers, the most-used across NATO countries. Though that’s double the amount of artillery that the United States was producing before Russia’s full-scale invasion, it’s far less than what Ukraine needs (Troops are firing about 7,000 rounds per day into Russian lines.). Without more money, U.S. officials say even that supply will dry up. 

“Do we have the money to do 100,000 [rounds of 155 mm artillery ammo per month]? The answer is yes, if they passed a supplemental,” Pentagon acquisition chief William LaPlante told reporters on the sidelines of the Reagan National Defense Forum this weekend in Simi Valley, California.

Across the pond, European Union officials have also said that they are far short of the 27-nation bloc’s target to produce 1 million 155 mm rounds by early 2024. Any break in the deliveries of U.S. weapons and ammo might give Russia more opportunity to reconstitute its devastated ground forces in Ukraine, meaning the political battles on Capitol Hill could have very stark consequences for the real battles in Ukraine.

“There will be huge implications on the front lines,” Coffey said. “They probably wouldn’t be felt immediately as aid is still moving in the pipeline, but as Ukraine weathers this cold winter, and as it prepares for what it wants to do on the battlefield next year, this [U.S.] funding is crucial.”