‘Good day for world peace’: Joe Biden signs Ukraine aid bill into law

Joe Biden signed into law on Wednesday the aid package, passed by the Senate late Tuesday night, totaling $95 billion, which includes nearly $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific. The package also includes a bill that could eventually ban TikTok in the United States, giving Chinese parent company ByteDance about nine months to sell the platform or face being banned from US app stores .

Wearing a pin with the American and Ukrainian flags on his suit, Joe Biden gave a speech from the White House after signing the aid bill into law on Wednesday. The US president said it was a “good day for America, a good day for Ukraine and a good day for world peace.”

The aid package, Biden said, “will make America safer. It will make the world safer. And America’s supremacy as world leader continues.”

The signing of the aid package was the culmination of months of tense negotiations in Congress, personal lobbying by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a split in the Republican side of the House that continues to threaten Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership position. Conservatives opposed additional US funding to Kiev and threatened to oust Johnson over his handling of the negotiations, CNN writes.

Biden spent months lobbying Johnson to move forward with Ukraine aid, calling on senior administration officials and CIA Director Bill Burns to support Ukraine and democracy in Europe and around the world.

Earlier this year, Biden signaled his intentions to make significant concessions on immigration if Congress moved forward with the aid bill. Republicans in Congress had called for those concessions but backed away from the issue after former President Donald Trump balked at allowing Biden to claim a victory on an issue Trump hopes to speculate on the campaign trail.

Biden acknowledged the bumpy road the bill has had in Wednesday’s speech.

“It’s been a tough road,” Biden said. “It should have been easier. He should have gotten there sooner. But in the end, we did what America always does: we rose in time, we united. I accomplished the mission.”

Most of his remarks in Wednesday’s speech referred to aid to Ukraine. Biden noted that Russia “is responsible for a brutal campaign against Ukraine.”

“They killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians,” Biden said, “they bombed hospitals … kindergartens, grain silos, tried to plunge Ukraine into a cold, dark winter.”

But what he didn’t say in the speech, CNN writes, is something that will likely cause even more frustration: Israel has also been accused of targeting Gaza hospitals, using starvation as a weapon of war and waging an imprecise military campaign. which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children. The aid package includes billions of dollars worth of additional military equipment for the Israelis.

Some of the Democrats who voted against the bill cited aid to Israel as the reason they opposed it.

The final vote in the Senate was 79-18. Fifteen Republicans voted with three Democrats against the bill. Among the Democrats who voted against the bill was Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spent time with Biden earlier this week and said he was against continued US funding of Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Enough is enough,” Sanders said in a post on X shortly after the bill passed. “No money for his war machine [prim-ministrul israelian Benjamin] Netanyahu”.

The effects of the bill will be felt most quickly on the battlefields of Ukraine, whose soldiers have faced ammunition shortages and frontline casualties in the absence of US assistance this year.

Biden said shipments of military supplies to Ukraine would begin “within the next few hours” and would include air defense equipment and ammunition for artillery and missile systems, along with armored vehicles.

The Pentagon announced that a $1 billion aid package would go to Ukraine, just moments after Biden signed the bill into law.

Capabilities included in the new package include ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Missile Systems (HIMARS), artillery rockets, RIM-7 and AIM-9M air defense missiles, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and more others. It also includes various logistical and tactical vehicles, anti-armor systems, training ammunition and spare parts and ammunition for small arms, including .50 caliber rounds to counter drones.

Publisher: MI