Washington (CNN) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed into law an aid package providing crucial military assistance to Ukraine, capping months of negotiations and debate.
The aid package, passed by the Senate late Tuesday evening and worth $95 billion in total, includes nearly $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific. The package also includes a bill that could eventually lead to the banning of TikTok in the United States – giving Chinese parent company ByteDance roughly nine months to sell it or else it will be banned from app stores in the United States.
The signing of the aid package was the culmination of months of tense negotiations, personal lobbying from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a split in the House Republican conference that continues to threaten the leadership position of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Hardline House conservatives opposed further US funding to Kyiv and threatened to oust Johnson over his handling of the negotiations. Conservatives in Congress have opposed additional assistance for what they view as an unwinnable war.
Biden had spent months lobbying Johnson to move forward with aid to Ukraine, enlisting top administration officials and CIA Director Bill Burns to lay out the stakes for Ukraine – and ultimately democracy in Europe and across the world – if Russia continued to make inroads in its military campaign there.
Earlier this year, Biden signaled his intentions to make significant immigration-related concessions if Congress were to move forward with the aid bill. Republicans in Congress had demanded those concessions, but retreated from the issue after former President Donald Trump signaled his opposition to allowing Biden to claim a win on an issue Trump hopes to campaign on.
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 further US funding of Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“Enough is enough,” Sanders said in a post on X shortly after the bill’s passage. “No more money for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war machine.”
The bill’s effects will be felt most quickly and acutely on battlefields in Ukraine, whose soldiers have faced ammunition shortages and battlefield losses in the absence of US assistance this year.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
The-CNN-Wire
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