A24 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
war in ukraine
BY ANDREW JEONGThe Pentagon will provide up
to $300 million in military sup-
plies to Ukraine, including
drones, armored vehicles and ma-
chine guns, as part of a broader
effort to boost Ukrainian forces
fighting Russia’s invasion.
The aid will be sent under the
Ukraine Security Assistance Ini-
tiative, a program that lets the
United States procure arms di-
rectly from manufacturers in-
stead of delivering weapons from
its own stockpiles to Ukraine,
Pentagon press secretary John
Kirby said Friday.
The latest package shows that
the assistance for Ukraine is
evolving after weeks of fighting,
as the United States and its part-
ners learn more about Moscow’s
assault tactics and Kyiv’s capabil-
ities. The Pentagon said it has
committed more than $1.6 billion
in security assistance since Rus-
sia’s invasion.
“This decision underscores the
United States’ unwavering com-
mitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty
and territorial integrity in sup-
port of its heroic efforts to repel
Russia’s war of choice,” Kirby said
in a statement.
The new aid will include Puma
unmanned aerial systems —
hand-launched lightweight
drones with a range of about a
dozen miles that can fly for about
two hours — providing Ukrainian
infantry with extended recon-
naissance capabilities. The Penta-
gon also intends to send Ukraine“nonstandard” machine guns,
meaning the weapons aren’t reg-
ularly used by the U.S. military.
The United States will send
armored Humvees, night-vision
devices, thermal imagery sys-
tems, tactical secure communica-
tions systems, commercial satel-
lite imagery services, medical
supplies and Switchblade drones
— small unmanned aircraft
packed with explosives that crash
into targets such as tanks in
“kamikaze” fashion.
The announcement comes a
day after British Defense Secre-
tary Ben Wallace told reporters
that Britain and its partners
agreed to send Ukraine more
lethal aid after a conference in-
volving 35 countries. Wallace said
the Ukrainians needed weapons
such as long-range artillery to
counter Russian sieges of Ukrai-
nian cities, according to British
media.“As the tactics on the ground
change, we need to change what
we supply,” he told reporters.
Last week, Australian Prime
Minister Scott Morrison also an-
nounced that Canberra would
send Kyiv armored vehicles, a day
after Ukrainian President Volod-
ymyr Zelensky told Australian
lawmakers that mine-resistant
Australian Bushmasters in
Ukraine “would do much more
for our common freedom, our
common security than staying
parked on your land.”
“The package from the [United
States] makes a lot of sense,” said
Mick Ryan, a retired major gener-
al in the Australian army. Ukrai-
nian troops need little training to
use the included equipment,
while they will also need to re-
place the drones, ammunition
and fuel they use in battle, he
said. The Puma drones will be
useful in preparing artillery androcket strikes, Ryan said.
The United States has rebuffed
Zelensky’s other requests, such as
setting up a no-fly zone, and
Poland’s offer to send fighter jets
to Ukraine amid fears of further
escalation involving a NATO
country. President Biden last
month signed a mammoth gov-
ernment spending bill that has
$13.6 billion in military and hu-
manitarian aid for Ukraine —
including investments meant to
help protect against cyberattacks
and bolster regional allies against
any further Kremlin-led aggres-
sion.
Since the beginning of the
Biden administration, the United
States has dispatched more than
$2.3 billion in defense support to
Ukraine, the Pentagon said.
As the prospect of a Russian
invasion loomed, the U.S. military
started accelerating weapons
shipments to Ukraine as early asDecember. The supplies included
weapons useful for fighting in
urban areas such as shotguns,
and protective suits for soldiers
handling unexploded ordnance.
Since Feb. 24, when Russia
invaded, the United States has
been sending more Javelin anti-
tank missiles and Stinger antiair-
craft missile systems.
President Biden has said he
will not send U.S. troops into
Ukraine. But he has ordered more
Americans to Eastern Europe to
deter Russia from further aggres-
sion. About 80,000 U.S. troops are
now in Europe.
“As the world responds to Rus-
sia’s aggression, we’re seeing
again how much American lead-
ership matters,” Defense Secre-
tary Lloyd Austin said Friday.
“Russia’s invasion isn’t just a mor-
tal threat to Ukraine. It’s a chal-
lenge to the rules-based interna-
tional system.”Pentagon commits another $300 million to Ukraine for security assistance
Package to include
drones, armored vehicles
and machine gunsSenate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters
that same day that President
Biden had “all the authority he
needs,” and the GOP withdrew
from talks and introduced its own
sanctions bill a week later.
When Russian forces crossed
the Ukrainian border on Feb. 24,
virtually every U.S. lawmaker
condemned the invasion, but
Congress as an institution took
no immediate action to respond.
In fact, five weeks later, Con-
gress has yet to send a piece of
stand-alone legislation to Biden
punishing Russia or aiding
Ukraine. Lawmakers did approve
a $13.6 billion package of military
and humanitarian aid last month,
but that legislation — which was
included in a massive must-pass
federal spending bill — has been
the exception proving the rule.
Efforts to pass measures ban-
ning Russian oil imports, remov-
ing trade preferences for Russia
and Belarus, denouncing Putin as
a war criminal and giving the
federal government more tools to
go after Russian apparatchiks
and oligarchs have all stalled on
Capitol Hill this year. Not so
much as a symbolic resolution
condemning the invasion has
passed both chambers despite the
broad bipartisan support for the
Ukrainian cause and a long-dis-
tance plea from President Volod-
ymyr Zelensky.
The reasons for the legislative
inaction are myriad, according to
interviews with more than a doz-
en lawmakers, aides and observ-
ers. They start with the workaday
challenges of getting things done
on Capitol Hill, such as clashes of
egos, partisan politicking, and
Senate rules that can work to
complicate even simple matters.
But they also involve a long-term
withering of a once-assertive con-
gressional role in foreign affairs
and national security, and a con-
comitant increase in political po-
larization around those issues.
While there is hope the legisla-
tive logjam could break as soon as
next week, the raw facts of the
situation have astonished some
longtime foreign policy hands
who recall an era when lawmak-
ers and presidents worked hand-
in-hand across party lines during
international crises.
“If not this, then what? If you
can’t get your act together on
legislating on something where
there is so much unanimity, you
know, when can you ever do it?”
said Dan Diller, a former aide to
Richard Lugar — a longtime Re-
publican senator from Indiana
who died in 2019 — who is now
policy director of the Lugar Cen-
ter, which focuses on global is-
sues.
The old Washington adage that
politics “stops at the water’s edge”
has clearly faded in relevance
since its Cold War heyday, added
Diller: “It’s simpler for the oppo-
sition party to sit on the sidelines
and criticize on cable news or
whatever than it is to put their
ideas on the line,” he said, “and
the party of the president knows
in this time of reduced congres-
sional authority in national secu-
rity policy that the president can
get his or her way, so they don’t
have to legislate.”
Those dynamics have been on
full display in recent months on
Capitol Hill. In short, congres-
sional Democrats have been loath
to bigfoot or undercut Biden as he
embarks on a strategy of assem-
bling a global coalition led by a
reinvigorated NATO to mount the
response to the Russian invasion.
Republicans, meanwhile, have
been determined to outflank
Biden, casting his approach as
weak and feckless — with some
CONGRESS FROM A1
clearly seeing the opportunity to
create a political wedge ahead of
November’s midterm elections.
McConnell, for instance, has
accused the Biden administra-
tion of emboldening Putin by
withdrawing from Afghanistan
and having “pulled their punch-
es” on Ukraine. Republican law-
makers have lined up to demand
that Biden do more, and faster,
and the pressure campaign has
played a clear role in shaping the
administration’s response.
But that rhetoric has been un-
dermined by GOP maneuvers
both past and present. Republi-
cans have been largely unwilling
to reckon with the impact of
President Donald Trump’s skepti-
cal relations with NATO or his
infamous ultimatum to Zelensky,
threatening to withhold key de-
fensive arms unless the Ukraini-
an president shared compromis-
ing and politically useful material
about Biden’s son Hunter.
More recently, scores of Repub-
licans voted against the bill con-
taining the billions of dollars in
Ukraine aid, complaining that it
was attached to a much broader
bill that funded domestic pro-
grams they oppose. And for two
weeks GOP senators have held up
quick passage of a House-passed
bill that would raise tariffs on
goods from Russia and Belaruswhile also reauthorizing and ex-
panding a federal law allowing
the government to impose sanc-
tions on foreign officials who
engage in serious corruption or
human rights abuses.
That together has fueled sharp
Democratic attacks on the GOP’s
posture on the Ukraine crisis and
added mounting pressure on Re-
publican leaders to break the
impasse.
“I think many of them really do
want to help Ukraine, but they
are so used to opposing a Demo-
cratic president on everything
and anything that they can’t fig-
ure out how to get out of their
own way,” said Sen. Chris Murphy
(D-Conn.). “There are crisis mo-
ments where both parties have to
get behind the president of the
United States. Democrats did that
after [the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks]. Republicans, by and
large, are not doing that.”
Sen. James E. Risch (Idaho),
the top Republican on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee,
said in an interview that the
legislative stalemate was “the na-
ture of the beast, unfortunately”
— referring to the ability of any
one senator to block quick action
on legislation. “Other side issues,
like politics and people running
for office and those types of
things,” he said, “sometimes getin the way of the objective.”
When the House trade-and-
sanctions bill came to the Senate
last month, it immediately en-
countered objections from Sen.
Mike Crapo (Idaho), the top Re-
publican on the powerful Senate
Finance Committee, who was
concerned the bill did not include
a provision banning Russian oil
imports. Senate Democrats
agreed to placate Crapo by mov-
ing a separate piece of oil legisla-
tion.
But then Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
objected to the portion of the bill
dealing with human rights sanc-
tions, arguing that the changes
could make it too easy for a
president to slap sanctions on a
foreign leader who simply had
unpopular views about abortion,
sexuality or other social issues.
The lawmakers who crafted the
new language insisted that it
would do nothing of the sort, but
Paul held his ground and won an
agreement to change the wording
of the bill.
With the text of the legislation
now reopened, more than a half-
dozen other senators have
emerged to seek other amend-
ments. That has complicated any
hopes of passing the bill through
the Senate, sending it back
through the House and putting it
on Biden’s desk before a two-weekrecess begins Thursday.
“All 100 senators have a right to
say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that
until you deal with my issue,’ ”
Crapo said Thursday. “And there
are more than just one or two
issues here.”
While it is largely Republican
politicking that has created the
present logjam, Democratic im-
peratives are dictating just what
sort of legislation even starts
moving in the first place. The
trade and oil-ban bills, for in-
stance, simply codify executive
orders that Biden has already
implemented, and the human
rights elements — an expansion
of the Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act — deal
with sanctions that are applied
and withdrawn solely by the pres-
ident.
More-provocative pieces of leg-
islation — such as a bipartisan
resolution calling on Biden to
supply Ukraine with MiG-29 jets
under NATO-member control —
have been ignored by Democratic
congressional leaders. That has
frustrated Republicans who have
wanted to act much more aggres-
sively, slapping sanctions on Rus-
sian officials and organizations
that cannot simply be withdrawn
by presidential fiat.
That underlying philosophical
clash sparked the breakdown of
the preinvasion negotiations:
Democrats would not accept con-
gressional action that would bind
Biden as he seeks to navigate the
crisis.
A “mother of all sanctions” bill
introduced by Senate Foreign Re-
lations Committee Chairman
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) aimed
at decimating the Russian econo-
my was written to act as a sword
of Damocles, taking effect only if
Russia chose to invade Ukraine.Risch’s GOP alternative — the
Never Yielding Europe’s Terri-
tory, or NYET, Act — would have
levied immediate sanctions in-
cluding an effective cancellation
of a key Russian-owned gas pipe-
line under the theory that a
punch in the nose would be a
more effective deterrent for Pu-
tin.
In the end, neither bill passed,
and Biden acted in concert with
allies after the Russian invasion
to impose virtually all of the
sanctions lawmakers had con-
templated. And, as far as most
Democrats are concerned, that is
just fine.
“We’ve moved with incredible
speed when it was necessary,”
said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-
H awaii), citing the $13.6 billion in
aid. “But a lot of these other bills
are about the legislative branch
trying to insert itself in foreign
policy in ways that are redundant
with what the Biden administra-
tion and the international com-
munity is already doing. This is a
lot of people wanting to display
their own leadership, and one of
the reasons that these bills are
not passing is they are not, in fact,
essential for our response.”
Even smaller, more targeted
bills have had trouble gaining
traction. A resolution condemn-
ing alleged Russian war crimes in
Ukraine and calling for an inter-
national investigation passed the
Senate unanimously last month,
but it has not been called up for a
vote in the House. Other bills —
such as one aimed at freezing
Russia’s use of its gold reserves
and another allowing the govern-
ment to liquidate seized Russian
assets and use the proceeds to
help Ukraine — have bipartisan
sponsors but no immediate path
to becoming law.
Meanwhile, Democrats have
seethed as Republicans have
blocked quick confirmations for
some nominees who would play
key roles in the response to the
conflict. Sen. Josh Hawley
(R-Mo.), for instance, objected
Tuesday to Biden’s nominee to
head the Pentagon’s logistics
branch, demanding that the Sen-
ate first hold a hearing on the
Afghanistan withdrawal.
The ongoing legislative inac-
tion has especially exasperated a
small bipartisan group of sena-
tors who have long been engaged
in Ukrainian relations and have
pressed their colleagues to get
over their partisan hang-ups and
leave a clear congressional im-
print on the response to the crisis.
“The opposition has been driv-
en by both ends of the political
spectrum in a way that has made
it hard to get an agreement,” said
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.),
who was barred from entering
Russia in 2017 due to her long
advocacy for tougher measures
against Putin.
But with the Ukraine conflict
now on a trajectory to continue
for months, if not years, Congress
still has time to get its act togeth-
er. Lester Munson, a former Re-
publican staff director for the
Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, said that it was reasonable
for lawmakers to give Biden a free
hand as the crisis unfolded but
that the time has now come for
them to set a more coherent and
durable strategic policy on pun-
ishing Russia and aiding Ukraine.
“Members of both parties have
been saying the right stuff —
that’s good, that’s important,” he
said. “But we’re getting about to
the time where Congress needs to
show that it’s thinking long-term.
... It’s time to come together and
show that there is a broad base of
support for a tough line here.”Marianna Sotomayor contributed
to this report.E≠orts to pass legislation punishing Russia have stalled
PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD THE WASHINGTON POSTABOVE: Sen. Mike Crapo
(R-Idaho), seen in December,
objected when the House’s
trade-and-sanctions bill came
to the Senate. D emocrats in the
chamber agreed to move a
separate piece of oil legislation.
LEFT: Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), left,
and Sen. James E. Risch
(Idaho), its top Republican,
seen in February, offered
competing b ills on Russian
sanctions. Neither passed.