US President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed into law an aid package providing crucial military assistance to Ukraine, capping months of negotiations and debate, CNN reports.
The aid package, passed by the Senate late Tuesday evening and worth $95 billion in total, includes nearly $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific. The package also includes a bill that could eventually lead to the banning of TikTok in the United States - giving Chinese parent company ByteDance roughly nine months to sell it or else it will be banned from app stores in the United States.
Wearing a US-Ukrainian flag pin and speaking from the White House after signing the bill on Wednesday, Biden said it was a “good day for America, a good day for Ukraine and a good day for world peace.”
The aid package, Biden said, is “going to make America safer. It’s going to make the world safer. And it continues America’s leadership in the world.”
The signing of the aid package was the culmination of months of tense negotiations, personal lobbying from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a split in the House Republican conference that continues to threaten the leadership position of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Hardline House conservatives opposed further US funding to Kyiv and threatened to oust Johnson over his handling of the negotiations. Conservatives in Congress have opposed additional assistance for what they view as an unwinnable war.
Biden had spent months lobbying Johnson to move forward with aid to Ukraine, enlisting top administration officials and CIA Director Bill Burns to lay out the stakes for Ukraine - and ultimately democracy in Europe and across the world - if Russia continued to make inroads in its military campaign there.
Earlier this year, Biden signaled his intentions to make significant immigration-related concessions if Congress were to move forward with the aid bill. Republicans in Congress had demanded those concessions, but retreated from the issue after former President Donald Trump signaled his opposition to allowing Biden to claim a win on an issue Trump hopes to campaign on.
He acknowledged the bumpy road to get the package passed in his remarks on Wednesday.
“It was a difficult path,” Biden said. “It should have been easier. It should have gotten there sooner. But in the end, we did what America always does: We rose to the moment, came together. We got it done.”
Spending the bulk of his remarks talking about the Ukraine aid, Biden noted that Russia has “been responsible for a brutal campaign against Ukraine.”
“They’ve killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians,” Biden said, “bombed hospitals … kindergartens, grain silos, tried to plunge Ukraine into a cold dark winter.”
But left unsaid in that statement is something that is likely to cause further frustrations from Biden’s left flank: Israel has also been accused of targeting hospitals in Gaza, using hunger as a weapon of war and carrying out an imprecise military campaign that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children. The aid package includes billions of dollars worth of additional military equipment for that country.
Some of the Democrats who voted against the bill cited the Israel aid as the reason why they did so.
The final vote in the Senate was 79-18. Fifteen Republicans voted with two Democrats and an independent against the bill. Among the senators who voted against the bill was Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spent time with Biden earlier this week and said he was against further US funding of Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Enough is enough,” Sanders said in a post on X shortly after the bill’s passage. “No more money for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war machine.”
