GOP had previously demanded Congress address US-Mexico border crossings before passing further foreign aid
House Republican leadership appears to be officially backing down from their demand for lawmakers to address border security before any further aid was passed to support Ukraine in its war against a Russian invasion.
The news was made on Thursday at the House Republican retreat, with Speaker Mike Johnson telling reporters that bills to further fund both Ukraine’s defence and Israel’s military effort against Hamas would be brought up separately in the coming weeks. There was no indication that Republicans would continue baulking at the idea of passing either of them without first striking some kind of deal on immigration reform or border security that could pass both chambers of Congress.
In December of last year, Mr Johnson had made that demand explicit, telling the White House in a letter: “[S]upplemental Ukraine funding is dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws”.
They successfully delayed things without saying their intention was to delay things like Ukraine aid.
They let Russia take back that city, and probably more and decided that was as much flak as they could handle without their blatantly obvious support of Russia becoming whatever is after blatant.
It’s a tiny bombed out town with no one there. It’s not really worth anything. In the process, Russia lost about ten irreplaceable planes and a ton of troops, tanks, APCs, artillery, etc. I don’t mean artillery shells. Ukraine was destroying a ton of artillery emplacements.
Attacking is much harder than defending. Russia is actually not very good at attacking, as we saw in the first month of the war. If Ukraine traded every tiny town for 10 planes and all the equipment and troops needed to capture it, Russia would collapse.
Don’t worry too much about it.
Wouldn’t it have been better to keep it then and keep destroying a disproportionate amount of Russian hardware in the process? All while keeping another city where this’ll happen next from being tuned into rubble?
That sounds pretty strategic to me?
Obviously it’s better to hold territory than to lose it. My point is, territory can be recovered. It never goes away. Russia can’t easily replace those planes or tanks. They don’t have good access to replacement parts for repairs and can’t build new ones without supplies from the US and Europe.
Plus the pilots and tank operators are not easily replaceable either. Russia is slowly burning through all their equipment and experienced troops. That’s a recipe for losing.