GOP congressman accuses Biden of ‘fooling himself’ on Ukraine aid

A Republican congressman contended ahead of Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to Congress on Wednesay that Joe Biden was the biggest hurdle standing in between Capitol Hill and Washington approving more aid to Ukraine.

In an interview with The Independent, Rep Brian Mast of Florida argued that it was not his party that presented the greatest resistance to sending more aid to Ukraine, but rather faulted a supposed lack of strategy from the Biden administration.

“There’s a half-a**ed approach going on...what’s going on here?” Mr Mast remarked. “The president is doing the sort of, the guise of saying, ‘we don’t want to be escalatory.’ And that’s a very real thing when you’re talking about a situation where nobody can say that there’s a zero per cent chance of nuclear war.”

“But he’s fooling himself if he thinks Patriot [missile] batteries are not escalatory, or isolating Russia is not escalatory, or arming [Ukraine] with anything from a 5.56 to a 7.62 round is [not escalatory],” the congressman continued.

Mr Mast was one of two center-right Republicans who spoke to The Independent on Wednesday about their party’s willingness to continue supporting Ukraine going forward.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, another Republican, said in a separate interview that he was not sure that he agreed with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s assertion that Ukraine remained the number one priority for lawmakers on the hill. Mr McConnell made at the comment at a press conference on Tuesday.

“The number one priority? I mean, it’s ... we gotta fight inflation, we got to control the crisis at the border. Aad we have a global challenge with, you know, issues regarding China. But, that said, Ukraine is a big issue,” he said.

“And we should be able to address more than one issue at once,” Mr Cassidy concluded.

A number of far-right Republicans like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House of Representatives have expressed opposition to providing Ukraine with further aid; some have even gone as far as disparaging Ukraine and Mr Zelensky as corrupt while making favourable or complimentary remarks in turn about Vladimir Putin and Russia.

So far, their sentiments have failed to gain support beyond the GOP’s back bench in the House. However, those backbenchers may find themselves in a place of increased leverage come January when the Republican Party finds itself presiding over a single-digit majority in the lower chamber.