Editorial: How steep a toll will Ukraine pay for needless delay in U.S. aid?

CBC Editorial: Thursday, April 25, 2024; #8925

The following is the opinion of Capitol Broadcasting Company

Only time will tell if as the saying “better late than never” goes, it will be enough to enable Ukraine to continue and hold off the relentless deadly aggression of Russia and its dictator Valdimir Putin.

Approval of the critical aid package was delayed by months of hypocritical wrangling, from a handful of GOP legislators at the behest of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yearning for a campaign issue, in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The needless delay cost lives in Ukraine and critical defensive positions.

The rapid enactment of the legislation over the last few days reveals just how unnecessary the hold-up was.

Biden signed the legislation just hours after receiving the $95.3 billion package of aide to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The Senate, with a strong bipartisan vote (North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis voted for the package while fellow Republican Ted Budd opposed it), passed it Tuesday night just a couple of days after it came over from the House of Representatives.

It was in the House, where a small minority of Republicans, including North Carolina’s Dan Bishop, reflexively bowed to Trump’s desire for a campaign issue on immigration and border security rather than passing compromise legislation that would have moved toward addressing the problem. These hypocrites put politics and the fealty to Trump ahead of problem solving.

Finally on Saturday the House, in a bipartisan 311-112 vote, passed the aid to Ukraine bill and sent it to the Senate.

Wednesday afternoon President Joe Biden declared: “It’s a good day for world peace. It’s going to make America safer, it’s going to make the world safer and it continues America’s leadership in the world and everyone knows it.”

But he quickly added that the unnecessarily tortured path should have “been easier and should have gotten there sooner.”

It was October – nearly six months ago – when the Biden administration first asked Congress to provide an aide package. Trump, a self-proclaimed admirer of Putin’s and who opposes aide to Ukraine, implored House Republicans to block passage on the grounds that the United States was taking on too much of the burden of aiding Ukraine. John F. Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council acknowledged this week the delay has hurt Ukraine’s defense. “The Russians have slowly but successfully taken more ground from the Ukrainians and pushed them back.”

Will it have been worth Biden’s delicate and patient persistence? Has Biden’s reluctance to provide Ukraine with the most powerful missiles and other defensive weaponry cost that nation the ability to most effectively defend itself?

It is not exaggeration that the battling in Ukraine is on the front-line of defending democracy. Those who bow to Trump’s demands to play immigration and border politics in the face of those giving up their lives in the fight for freedom in Ukraine are hypocrites.

President Biden well-knows that patience is a virtue. We can only hope, in the case of this latest aid to Ukraine, the cost of patience doesn’t come at the expense of that nation’s freedom and security.

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