Being the Current Thing is a precarious honour. To paraphrase Krusty the Clown, one day, you’re the most important thing there ever was; the next day, you’re some schmo begging for handouts and pissing everyone off.
Of course, Ukraine has been begging for handouts all along, but for a while we were told to pretend that it was the most important thing there ever was. Now, though, hardly anyone’s buying that line any more. Certainly not American taxpayers, who are jacked to the hilt with funding another round of Forever Wars and lining the pockets of dodgy Eastern European oligarchs. At least some of their representatives are listening.
Conservative Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky) announced Wednesday he will hold up any funding bill to keep the government open past Sept 30 if it includes funding for the war in Ukraine.
This has been the Democrats’ dodge for two long: stitching up contentious measures into so-called “Omnibus Bills”.
“Today I’m putting congressional leadership & @POTUS on notice that I will oppose any effort to hold the federal government hostage for Ukraine funding. I will not consent to expedited passage of any spending measure that provides any more U.S. aid to Ukraine,” Paul wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Paul is also cutting off a dodgy gambit from Chuck Schumer to try and hide money to keep the government running as “Ukraine aid”.
That means if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants to add Ukraine money to a stopgap measure to fund federal departments and agencies, he would have to go through the time-consuming process of filing cloture and scheduling a vote to end debate on the bill, which would take a few days.
The country risks a shutdown if Congress doesn’t pass what’s known as a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open past Sept 30.
The problem Schumer faces is that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) hasn’t been able to muster up enough votes in the House to pass a CR and send it to the Senate.
The impasse in the House is holding up action in the Senate, giving Paul leverage to threaten Ukraine funding.
American taxpayers have already been stiffed to the tune of around a hundred billion, in order to make sure Joe Biden’s proxy war grinds on without even a hint of peace negotiations. Now, Sleepy Joe is ferreting around at the backs of their couches for even more billions.
President Biden has requested $24 billion in security and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
The Hill
By which he means, ‘weapons’.
It’s not just Americans who are growing fed up with propping up Ukraine. Even its neighbours, who, we’re supposed to believe, are trembling in fear of being the next domino in Big Bad Vlad’s wicked plot to conquer the world, have had enough.
Poland will no longer send arms to Ukraine in order to focus on its own defence, the Polish prime minister has said, a few hours after Warsaw summoned Kyiv’s ambassador amid a row over grain exports.
“We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” Mateusz Morawiecki said, in response to a question about whether Warsaw would continue to support Kyiv despite the grain exports disagreement.
Poland has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters after Russia invaded in February 2022 and is one of Kyiv’s main weapons suppliers. It also hosts a million Ukrainian refugees, who have been supplied with various forms of state aid.
But when push comes to shove, good old EU protectionism wins out.
Tensions between Warsaw and Kyiv were sparked by Poland’s ban on Ukrainian grain imports to protect the interests of its farmers, and have intensified in recent days […]
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has closed off Black Sea shipping lanes used before the war, resulting in the EU becoming a major transit route and export destination for Ukrainian grain.
In May, the EU agreed to restrict imports to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, seeking to protect farmers there who blamed the imports for a slump in prices on local markets.
Put bluntly, Poland is arguing that, in return for all the help it has doled out to Ukraine, in return it has seen the economic legs cut out from its own farmers.
The measures allowed the products to keep transiting through the five countries, but stopped them being sold on the local market.
But on Friday, the European Commission said it was ending the import ban, arguing that “the market distortions in the five member states bordering Ukraine have disappeared”.
Poland, Hungary and Slovakia immediately announced they would defy the move.
The issue is particularly sensitive in Poland, where elections take place next month. The existing populist right-wing government of the Law and Justice party has strong support in farming regions.
The Guardian
Zelensky may have the authoritarian luxury of unilaterally suspending elections and jailing opponents, but Poland is still an actual democracy. And the government is about to face voters.
