The United States’ top official expresses growing concern over Ukraine’s financial assistance.
Both Republicans and Democrats are “starting to question” why Washington is helping Kiev. Victoria Nuland said that.
Victoria Nuland, the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said on Monday that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are having second thoughts about giving Ukraine different kinds of aid while it is at war with Russia.
The US Chamber of Commerce asked Nuland to speak on a panel about the conflicting political views in Washington regarding whether or not to support Kiev.
The official from the State Department tried to downplay the tension by saying that the US “has contributed more than $30 billion to Ukraine’s security, economic growth, and humanitarian situation.”
“You can’t do that without a lot of help from both parties in Congress,” she said.
She then said, “People on the edges of both parties are starting to question, but when you look at how this issue is polled across the country, you can see that Americans hate bullies.”
Nuland says that US citizens “understand that this thing will just keep going on if we don’t stop this war here if we don’t restore international law and respect for the UN Charter.”
Nuland’s comments come after an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released earlier this month found that 48% of Americans support the US giving weapons to Ukraine, while 29% are against it, and 22% are not sure. This is a 12% drop from a similar poll in May 2022, when 60% of US adults said they wanted the US to help Ukraine with military support.
In the past few months, some Republicans have asked over and over again for a review of US aid to Ukraine. In early December, a similar resolution was narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives. But at the beginning of February, a dozen Republicans in Congress introduced the “Ukraine Fatigue Resolution,” which asked Washington to stop giving Kiev money and military aid.
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy says that between January 2022 and January 2023, the US government gave Ukraine about $77.5 billion, most of which went to military aid.
Russia has told the West many times that arming Ukraine would only make the conflict last longer. Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for the Kremlin, said on Tuesday that NATO’s support for Ukraine made it a full participant in the fighting between Moscow and Kyiv. He also said that the US-led military bloc “is no longer acting as our conditional opponent, but as our enemy.
