No funding deal in congress for Ukraine this year, the Senate will take the issue up in 2024.

 

Senators McConnell and Schumer with Ukrainian President Zelensky. 

Senate leadership in both parties admitted that there will be no funding deal for Ukraine this year and will take up the issue again in 2024. AFP. Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer said that they would work to make a deal in 2024 and would take the issue up after the return to work on January 8th. Joe Biden had tried to make a deal happen by making support for Israel conditional on passing support for Ukraine, but that backfired as Republicans demanded major concessions on illegal immigration. However, even if a deal was made in the Senate it would be much more difficult to pass in the Republican controlled house, where new Speaker Mike Johnson is much more critical of additional funding for the war. Johnson demands more accountability and an actual strategy for the war before sending any funds. 

My Comment:

As expected there will be no new funding for Ukraine from the United States this year. Indeed, it was clear that was going to be the case for some time now. The Biden administration really stepped in it and have not been able to get a deal done, which is not at all surprising. 

Will a deal be made in 2024? It's possible but I think it's fairly unlikely at this point. The Republicans know that they have the Biden administration over a barrel here. Biden does not want a deal on immigration as his far left supporters are already infuriated with him and he is hemorrhaging support from young people in recent polls. A deal with the GOP on immigration will absolutely make that situation even worse for Biden. 

I have also said that basically everyone is looking for a way out of the Ukraine conflict ever since it was very clear that the summer offensive was an abject failure. A semi-phony fight about funding allows both Republicans and Democrats to blame each other when Ukraine eventually collapses. 

What should be even more concerning for Ukraine is that funding is not only drying up from the United States but it is also drying up from Europe. The Europeans too aren't keen on sending more money to a conflict that seems lost and even less so when they know that the Americans aren't going to send any money either. 

That's horrible news for Ukraine and good news for Russia (and for anyone that actually wants to see an end to this horrible war). The effects of this are already being seen on the battlefront with Ukrainian units shepherding their remaining vehicles and massively rationing their artillery. They know the gig is up and they have to make sure they have some kind of reserves for when the Russians come. 

And the Russians are coming. Putin knows that he's got the war won, he just needs to stick with it and win it in a way that does the least amount of damage to his country. I don't know if that means we will see a major offensive from Russia, Putin might just be content to keep up the pressure from probing attacks across the front instead of one major attack, but we will be seeing an uptick in the conflict once the ground freezes and the mud goes away. 

What really gets me is that Ukraine did have an advantage for awhile and could have made an attempt at a negotiated settlement. But then Bakhmut fell and they launched their idiotic summer offensive that chewed up so many men and equipment that they probably can't launch a major offensive again. If Putin feels like negotiating, and that's a huge if, they will get a dramatically worse deal than they would have gotten before. 

I do think that there needs to be a reckoning for the failure that is the Ukraine war in the United States. Not only was the war a stupid idea in the first place, we had no real beef with Russia, it was executed incredibly incompetently. I don't think there is a scenario where Ukraine could have won a decisive victory over Russia but they could have been done better than they did and that's mostly on the Biden administration. 

The real question now is if the war ends before the election in November. If Ukraine falls or settles the war on bad terms then I would hope that voters would punish Biden and his party for the failure. But I also would have thought that he and his party would have been punished severely by the voters for his failure in Afghanistan but that largely didn't happen. I would think that the failure in the Ukraine would be more dramatic but who understands what the voters do these days? I certainly don't. 

Either way though, America and our NATO allies are heading towards a huge loss of face. We did everything in the war except join it directly and it has exposed us. Our leadership, our weapons, our economy, all of them have been shown to be no where near as powerful as they were perceived to be. Indeed, that's why we heard rumblings of war in Venezuela and that's why a real war broke out in Israel. And it's also why the Houthi rebels in Yemen are shooting missiles at our destroyers in the Red Sea. America is no longer the world's biggest and most powerful power.