Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) laid out his opposition to providing more funding for the war in Ukraine on Friday, arguing that even if Congress passes another $60 billion in assistance for its war against Russia, it won’t change the course of a war Vance believes Ukraine can’t win.
Vance, in an op-ed for The New York Times, pushed back on President Biden’s and Democrats’ assertions that Republicans are preventing Ukraine from defeating Russia on the battlefield, arguing: “This is wrong.”
“Ukraine’s challenge is not the GOP; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field,” he wrote. “And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.”
Vance, a close ally of former President Trump, has emerged as the Senate’s leading opponent of the $95 billion emergency foreign package — which included $60 billion for Ukraine — passed by the Senate in February and now sitting in the House.
Biden and Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, including Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have applied growing pressure to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to bring the Senate bill to the House floor.
McConnell argued on the Senate floor that “starving Ukraine of needed capabilities” is “strategic and moral malpractice.”
But Vance says even if Congress passes the aid package, it will make little difference.
“Sixty billion dollars is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war,” he wrote.
McConnell, however, argues that much of the military aid for Ukraine would be spent in the United States to expand the domestic defense industry’s production capacity.
Speaking on the Senate floor earlier this year, McConnell argued the emergency defense spending package would “increase procurement of critical munitions, long-range fires, and air defenses and invest in our own defense industrial capacity.”
“This is essential for long-term competition with China and Russia,” he added, warning that without the additional spending to restore military stocks sent to Ukraine, America and its allies would be “outgunned in critical capabilities.”
“Our supplemental appropriations to support Ukraine have included heavy investments in expanding our defense industrial base and purchasing the cutting edge-weapons our own forces need to deter our biggest adversaries,” McConnell said when urging his colleagues to support the Senate package earlier this year.
After a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in December, Biden vowed, “I will not walk away from Ukraine, and neither will the American people.”
He pledged to provide U.S. military assistance as long as Congress appropriated the money.
“Without supplemental funding, we are rapidly coming to an end of our ability to help Ukraine to respond to the urgent operational demands that it has,” the president warned.
But Vance in his op-ed argued Biden “has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.”
He said that even though the United States has doubled its production of 155 mm shells, it’s “less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs.”
And he argued that while Zelensky has said Ukraine needs thousands of Patriot missile interceptors to shoot down guided aerial bombs, drones and missiles, the U.S. manufactures only 550 Patriot missiles every year.
“If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council did not respond to a request to respond to Vance’s op-ed.
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