The White House has warned that unless the funding measure includes aid for Ukraine, the US president will reject it.
According to the White House budget office, US President Joe Biden will not approve a military aid package for Israel that has the support of Republicans if it does not include billions of dollars for Ukraine.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) criticised the Republican plan, claiming that it “inserts partisanship into support for Israel” and that Kiev has not received enough funding for its fight against Russia.
The office stated that “bifurcating Israel security assistance from the other priorities in the national security supplemental will have global consequences.” Congress has “consistently worked in a bipartisan manner to provide security assistance to Israel, and this bill threatens to unnecessarily undermine that longstanding approach.”
On Monday, Republicans in Congress proposed a $14 billion aid plan for Israel, which included cuts to security assistance to Ukraine and monies set aside for the Internal Revenue Service under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans’ newly designated House Speaker Mike Johnson has declared that he wants to “bifurcate” aid to Israel and Ukraine, a move that clearly contradicts the White House’s strategy of tying the two problems together.
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The Republican bill “is bad for Israel, the Middle East region, and for our own national security,” the OMB continued, but it also said that the White House would keep working with lawmakers to reach a compromise.
While the majority of Republicans openly back Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas in Gaza, party support for Kiev has been acrimonious. GOP resistance prevented the White House from obtaining billions in funding intended for Ukraine during recent talks to prevent a government shutdown. The incident led to the removal of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was accused by some dissident Republicans of trying to curry favour with Democrats on stopgap budget legislation.
Legislators decided to delay the matter until a more comprehensive spending deal, even though they enacted a temporary financing bill earlier this month to prevent a government shutdown.
Rejecting Republican criticism, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that Washington cannot “pull the rug out from under them now,” and that Russia would beat Ukraine even in the absence of US assistance.
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President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine apparently feels “betrayed” by Kiev’s Western allies despite approximately $50 billion in direct US military help since February 2022, according to his advisors who recently spoke with Time Magazine. This is because armament supplies have slowed down. According to a member of Zelensky’s squad, “they have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it,” the publication stated.
