The House on Tuesday approved nearly $40 billion in additional aid for Ukraine as the country battles Russia’s brutal invasion, now in its third month.
The package of military, economic and humanitarian support, which is $7 billion more than the $33 billion President Biden requested, was approved on a bipartisan vote of 368-to-57, with the Senate expected to follow suit this week.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday afternoon that he spoke with Biden last week and asked that the Ukraine package move “by itself and quickly.”
“It needs to be clean of extraneous matters directly related to helping the Ukrainians win the war,” McConnell told reporters.
Exiting their respective party lunches Tuesday afternoon, Senate Democrats and Republicans each expressed a measure of optimism that both chambers of Congress could act to send a bill to Biden’s desk by the end of the week.
Recounting the Democratic gathering, where Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova spoke, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters that lawmakers heard a “heartfelt and easy-to-understand message.”
“People are dying, they’re running out of supplies and ammunition [and] they need our help quickly,” he said of Markarova’s message. He noted that the top diplomat told Democrats, “Thank you and speed it up.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said he thought that the Senate could vote “as early as the end of the week,” noting that at one point, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) “were talking by phone in the middle of the lunch, so I think it was really being negotiated.”
Republicans offered a similarly hopeful note. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), the top GOP lawmaker on the Senate Appropriations Committee, described the talks as “really, really close; we’re on the right track.”
“Let’s see what the House does,” he said. “If it’s good and palatable . . . we’ll take it. But we gotta see.”
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