Volodimir Zelensky arrived in Washington this Monday on a desperate mission: to save US aid to his country so that Ukraine can face the Russian invasion. At stake are the 61.4 billion dollars (59.5 billion euros) that Joe Biden’s Government wants to deliver to kyiv and that would allow Ukraine to resist at least throughout 2024, an electoral year in which legislative activity will be practically paralyzed. .
But Zelensky is not the only one in Washington lobbying on Ukraine. His enemies have also arrived. As reported on Sunday by The Guardian newspaper, the Trumpist think tank Heritage Foundation is holding a closed-door meeting between today and tomorrow in which advisors to Hungarian President Viktor Orban will talk with Republican congressmen. Although the official agenda is to discuss the “culture wars” – fundamentally, gender issues – it seems unlikely that they will not touch on the Ukrainian issue. Orban has blocked the delivery of €50 billion from the EU to Ukraine, and has clearly aligned himself with Vladimir Putin in the war.
The Republican opposition opposes aid. Their official position is that, to approve it, Democrats will have to agree to immigration reform. But they don’t even have a clear position. In the Senate they demand a reform of asylum legislation, so that it is more difficult for the Administration to accept newcomers under that assumption and, in addition, expand the so-called express deportations, which allow officials to return immigrants to their countries. of origin without the intervention of a judge. In the House of Representatives, they basically demand to implement the immigration policy that Donald Trump promised, including the construction of hundreds of kilometers of the wall with Mexico.
The first of those options is unacceptable to Democrats. The second is, rather, anathema. The White House knows that it has a very small margin to give in on immigration because the Democratic left considers that political chapter non-negotiable. Furthermore, a portion of young Democratic voters, whom Biden needs to win the election, are already furious with the president for his unconditional support for Israel in Gaza. If we add to this the abandonment of the immigration cause, Biden can now begin to think about how he is going to pack his bags to return to Delaware in January 2025.
But immigration is just an excuse. Republicans do not want the US to support Ukraine. A poll by the Michigan Ross company for the Financial Times newspaper reveals that 65% of that party’s voters believe that the United States is giving too much aid to kyiv. Among independents, the figure drops to 52%, and with Democrats, to 32%. Aid to Ukraine is not popular in the United States, largely due to the proliferation on social networks of all kinds of atrocities about Zelensky’s alleged yachts, the trafficking of children from Ukraine to feed the world’s pedophiles, or even the creation of Covid-19 in CIA laboratories in that country.
All these atrocities have permeated public opinion. Added to them is the sympathy of the Republicans towards Vladimir Putin, whom they see as a political model, and whose system of Government is very similar to the one that Donald Trump is saying he is going to put into practice if he wins the elections, including arrest of journalists and political rivals and banning the broadcasting rights of the MSNBC television network, which is highly critical of him.