Under the US president’s appeal to Congress, Kiev would receive $275 million less each month.
According to documents made public on Friday, the $105 billion spending request US President Joe Biden proposed to Congress would reduce the monthly support to the Ukrainian government to $825 million.
The financing for Israel, Taiwan, and the US border is being combined with aid to Ukraine, as Biden explained in his speech on Thursday night. According to US media, the bundle aims to win over Congress’s bipartisanship.
According to the 69-page proposal the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gave to the acting Speaker of the House, Patrick McHenry, aid to Ukraine would total $61.4 billion, and Israel would receive $10.6 billion.
One of the discoveries in the document is that as part of the Economic Support Fund programme, the US has been providing $1.1 billion to Ukraine every month, allowing Kiev to close budget gaps and pay staff.
According to the OMB request, “This request provides a glidepath from $1.1 billion in direct budget support per month to $825 million per month,” for a total of $11.775 billion. These figures are based on the most recent IMF projections for Ukraine’s budget for 2024 and US “assumptions of robust burden sharing by the EU, Japan, and other donors.”
Russia “is explicitly seeking to ensure that Ukraine’s economy collapses in order to secure Ukraine’s surrender,” the OBM letter states, making Kiev’s support vital. Additionally, it states that the funds will be given to the Ukrainian government “through the World Bank as reimbursements for authorised and verified expenditures in accordance with the current conditionality framework.” This conditionality framework was created by the US.
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Other prominent proposals in the OMB proposal included increasing the loan guarantees for Ukraine from $4 billion to $8 billion and lowering the drawdown cap for military aid from $100 million to $7 billion.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on a conference call on Friday that Congressional action is required “to ensure that we can continue to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs and protect its people” because the funds previously authorised by Congress “has nearly run out.”
Since Kevin McCarthy was dismissed as speaker of the House of Representatives on October 3, apparently because of a covert agreement he had made with the White House regarding Ukraine financing, the House has been without a speaker. His successor has not yet been chosen.
