The White House has asked the US Congress for 21 billion dollars (19 billion euros) in military aid for Ukraine. Of that amount, 61.9% (about 12,000 million euros) is in military aid, and the rest (about 7,300 million) for the reconstruction of the country. To date, the United States has entered Ukraine 70,699 million euros, of which 60.5% correspond to military aid, according to data from the German think tank Institute for the World Economy in Kiel.
The request comes just as the latest aid package, approved in January worth more than $35 billion, is about to run out. In reality, the Joe Biden government’s plan was for that budget to run out of funds in June or July, but the detection of an accounting error when valuing the weapons transferred from the warehouses of the US Armed Forces has made it possible to discover that the material given to Kiev was actually nearly €5.7 billion short of budget. That allows Washington to continue supplies until probably the end of September. Thereafter, if Congress does not approve more funds, the US will have to drastically cut military cooperation with Ukraine.
That’s where the request comes from. Joe Biden’s team is confident that this will be approved by Congress next month, so that the airlift to kyiv will be maintained. But the US government is also aware that popular support for Ukraine has eroded. Although it denies it to the public, behind closed doors the White House is very concerned about a poll by the CNN television network that reveals that 51% of Americans oppose the delivery of more aid to Kiev.
This lower support reinforces the positions of the most nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which sympathizes with Vladimir Putin. Thus, the main candidate of that party in the 2024 elections, Donald Trump, continues without saying if he wants Russia or Ukraine to win, and his co-religionist in the Senate, Tommy Tuberville, boasted on Thursday that he is going to vote “no” to the new aids. Tuberville is a conservative who has blocked the appointment of hundreds of top military commanders – including the commander in chief of the Marines – for his opposition to the Armed Forces paying for abortions or sex changes for soldiers, for which he is close to the Vladimir Putin’s policy on gender issues.
American weariness in Ukraine is also due to the absence of encouraging news from the front. Although the Biden government insists that the Kiev counteroffensive is making progress, the advances in the south of the country are only a few hundred meters per day. Until this step, it is impossible for them to achieve a break in the Russian defensive lines that would allow them to even clearly approach the cities of Mariupol and Melitopol, their two objectives in this operation.
If Ukraine seizes one of those locations, it will have split the strip of land that Russia controls in two and put Moscow’s control of the Crimean peninsula in serious jeopardy. Today, Ukraine’s most advanced axis is in the town of Urozhaine, which had about 1,000 inhabitants before the war, and is still about 85 kilometers from Mariupol in a straight line.
The problem for Ukraine is that, if it has not reached Melitopol or Mariupol before October, it will have to suspend the offensive as the rain makes the ground impassable for tanks. The black soils of Ukraine are the most fertile in the world. But they have that miraculous productivity because they have a surface layer one and a half meters deep made up of humus and phosphorus which, in addition to helping plants grow, gets soaked and, when armored vehicles weighing tens of tons pass, becomes in a quagmire -the famous rasputitsa- that paralyzes the movements of military teams.
Meanwhile, Biden does not want an escalation. Not so much because of Russia, but because it is having to limit the supply of arms to Taiwan – which faces a threat of invasion from China in 2027, according to the US – to give equipment to Ukraine, and it does not want an escalation of the war in an election year either. like 2024, in which the current president’s bet to continue in the White House involves selling his management of the economy and trying to present a political, social and economic panorama that is as calm as possible, inside and outside the US, just at the antipodes of what the political style of what seems to be his adversary, Donald Trump, supposes. The White House doesn’t seem interested in negotiations with Russia, but it doesn’t want the Ukraine war to spread to other countries or hit the economy again.
