The US Senate reached an agreement on Sunday between Democrats and Republicans to release new aid to Ukraine as well as to Israel and to toughen US migration policy, a text that President Joe Biden called for “quickly adopting “.
The deal, totaling $118.3 billion in funding, includes $60 billion in aid for Kiev’s war effort against Russia’s invasion and $14.1 billion for Israel, according to a summary released by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray.
It also provides an envelope of $20.2 billion for migration policy reforms, the subject of fierce debate between Republican and Democratic negotiators.
“We reached a bipartisan national security agreement that includes the strongest and fairest migration reforms in decades. I strongly support it,” Mr. Biden responded in a statement, urging Congress to “adopt it quickly.”
It must be “brought to my desk so that I can promulgate it immediately,” he added.
The adoption of this text is, however, far from guaranteed, with more and more Republicans in the House of Representatives opposing the sending of new funds to Ukraine.
The United States, by far the primary military supporter of Ukraine, has been struggling for several months to validate this envelope, insistently demanded by President Joe Biden and his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.
Two years after the start of a bogged-down war – and more than $110 billion already released by Congress – Republicans, in particular, began to find the bill too high.
Aware that the sense of emergency has faded in Washington since the start of the war in 2022, President Biden asked Congress in October to combine his request for aid for Ukraine with another of approximately Israel, an ally of the United States in war against the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
He also wanted to include a drastic reform of the United States’ migration policy, a politically hot topic, which is all the more so in the middle of an election year.
To be adopted, this envelope must be approved in the Senate, where it should in theory obtain the support of elected officials from both parties, then in the House of Representatives. This is where things get complicated. Its president, the “ speaker » Mike Johnson, a Donald Trump loyalist, warned at the end of January that as it stands, any vote in his room on new funding for aid to Ukraine as well as for strengthening the border with Mexico was “stillborn”.
Since the start of the conflict, the Kremlin has been banking on the decline in Western aid, and any hesitation from kyiv’s allies reinforces Russia’s belief that its bet will be a winner.
At the end of December, the United States released its last tranche of available military aid to Ukraine.