U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Dec. 4 that he will not put to a vote a request for an additional $24 billion in aid to Ukraine following reports that President Joe Biden was quietly asking Congress to green light further assistance to Kyiv before he leaves office.
Roughly $16 billion of the sum could be used to restock U.S. arsenals, while the remaining $8 billion would go to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), Politico reported.
When asked if he would add aid for Ukraine to a continuing resolution to fund the government, Johnson rejected such a move.
"I’m not planning to do that," he said during a press briefing.
According to Johnson, Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election will "change the dynamics" of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine.
"It is not the place of Joe Biden to make that decision now, we have a newly elected president, and we are going to wait and take the new commander in chief’s direction on all that, so I don’t expect any Ukraine funding to come up now," he added.
Johnson, a Republican and staunch Trump supporter, contributed to a delay in aid to Kyiv last fall by refusing to hold a vote on various iterations of a $61 billion foreign assistance bill, but eventually reached a deal to pass the bill.
The Biden administration is trying to ship in as much aid to Ukraine as possible before Trump, who has criticized military support for Kyiv, takes office in January.
Trump has consistently said he would seek to get the U.S. "out" of the war and bring Kyiv and Moscow to the negotiating table. While the details of his plan remain unclear, some reports indicate it might entail Ukraine ceding territory and at least temporarily foregoing its NATO aspirations.
The Kyiv IndependentOlena Goncharova