Midterms Could Threaten Ukraine's Future as Putin Ramps Up Attacks

To date, efforts to help Ukraine fight back against invasion by Russian forces have been bipartisan.

Members of the House and Senate have overwhelmingly supported multibillion-dollar aid packages to Ukraine on several occasions this year. Meanwhile, additional transfers of military funding unilaterally approved by President Joe Biden's administration have largely gone without protest, with Republican leadership in Congress largely supportive of continuing to push back against Russia's incursion into the Ukrainian heartland.

Until recently.

Last month, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—the likely speaker of the House should Republicans gain the majority this fall—said there will be no more "blank check" for Ukraine if his party reclaims the majority.

And while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been a stalwart supporter of aid to Ukraine, there have been some holdouts among his membership, as public opinion has slowly begun to sour against additional aid.

"Republicans should be the party of nationalism, not nation building," Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley tweeted on May 24, shortly after he and 11 other Republicans voted against a multibillion-dollar aid package to the country.

While Ipsos polling from October shows a clear majority of the country supports continued aid to Ukraine, that level of support is decreasing, with a clear trend among voters of being less willing to support candidates who back additional aid to defend the country. Today, approximately 59 percent of Americans support continued aid to Ukraine, while 41 percent do not.

The signs have been enough to prompt concern from the commander-in-chief himself, who media reports say is likely to request additional aid before year's end.

While aides have suggested to outlets like Politico that he would be able to muscle a deal in a Republican-controlled Congress, Biden told reporters he was "worried" about the possibility of future United States assistance to Ukraine if Republicans win control of either chamber in the upcoming midterm elections while on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh for Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman.

Particularly as a growing number of Republican Senate candidates on the campaign trail have expressed reluctance for continuing aid to Ukraine.

The contrasts were recently on display in Georgia, where Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock's views of U.S. intervention in the conflict versus his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker's, were abundantly clear in a recent debate in Savannah.

Warnock had voted to send aid to Ukraine on numerous occasions. He previously voted to impose sanctions on Russia's Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to deter Russian hostilities toward Ukraine. On the campaign trail, he has emphasized his record pushing back on efforts by President Joe Biden's administration to draw down funding for the Savannah Combat Readiness Center. And since the war's start, he has emphasized his support for continued aid to Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia's incursion into eastern Europe.

"We have to strengthen our allies and the NATO alliance as we've done, and make sure we stand up to Russian aggression," he said during a recent debate. "Nothing could be more important."

Walker, to that point, had been somewhat harder to read. After a statement at the start of the war broadly blaming Biden for a global lack of respect for American strength, Walker has rarely ventured into specifics on his foreign policy, saying in a February speech that he believed the U.S. should "clean your own house up first before you start talking about cleaning someone else's house."

His statements in the ensuing months, however, appeared to show a loose grasp of the geopolitical situation in Ukraine. While he said in a recent NBC News interview he did not approve sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, in March, Walker incorrectly asserted NATO had not been doing enough to deter Russia's aggression in the region, despite the military alliance's billions of dollars in military aid and central role in the conflict. Namely, that NATO's direct involvement has prompted an even greater escalation of the conflict.

Walker's campaign website offers no mention of Ukraine and sparse details on foreign policy. When asked about his position on U.S. involvement in the war if Russia were to use nuclear weapons during a recent debate in Georgia, Walker essentially dodged the question, instead using it to lob an attack at his Democratic opponent.

"Putin is a bully," Walker said. "And the way you beat a bully is to show strength. Senator Warnock says he's stood up [to Biden] and he has not stood up. If he was standing up, he wouldn't vote with him 96 percent of the time but gave us an open border, but gave us high inflation, which gave us crime in the streets. He talked about standing up. He didn't stand up. He had laid down every time he came around."

The closest race in the country—Nevada's U.S. Senate race between Republican Adam Laxalt and Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez-Masto—also presents one of the clearest contrasts between a sitting Democratic incumbent and the self-styled populist conservative candidate seeking to replace them.

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Laxalt made his "America First" foreign policy bona fides clear in a brief speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he—like Walker—derided Biden for projecting a weak posture to the rest of the world.

"If you attack your country, if your elites do not believe in our nation, and they tell the rest of the world that we are flawed, and we are damaged, what do you think that tells Vladimir Putin? It tells him it's the time to march," he told convention-goers. "And America will not be strong enough to stand up, the West will not be strong enough to stand up."

Like a minority of Republicans in the ensuing months, Laxalt, who once had to testify in federal court about illegal campaign contributions funneled from Russian oligarch Andrey Muraviev through donors Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, attacked Cortez-Masto for supporting a $40 billion Ukrainian aid package passed with broad, bipartisan support in May, describing it as a "shockingly abhorrent proposal."

"For once, Sen. Masto should break from failed Washington policies and actually focus on the problems here at home," Laxalt's campaign said at the time.

In response, a campaign representative told Reno's KOLO-TV that Laxalt had "consistently sided with Vladimir Putin and America's enemies," adding that Laxalt "has emerged as the most pro-Putin Senate candidate across the country."

But Laxalt is not alone. Ohio Senate hopeful J.D. Vance has regularly blasted additional aid to Ukraine in a state with a sizable Ukrainian community. And in Arizona, Republican Blake Masters—another critic of the deal—has also maintained a strong anti-interventionist streak. In Tuesday Q&A with onetime opponent Marc Victor, he accused the U.S. State Department of "always itching to intervene" in foreign affairs, saying they strove to make every country a "satellite of America."

"I just don't think that that works, and we need to reconsider almost everything right?" he said in the video. "I mean, you and I agree about having a strong military. We want to actually keep America safe. But the goal is defense. The goal is not perpetual offense, which we've seen failed time and time again."

Those statements might not necessarily indicate the new classes' willingness to completely buck the country's foreign policy establishment, James Carafano, an expert on U.S. national security and foreign policy challenges at the Heritage Institute, told Newsweek.

Rather, it could be a sign there is an urge among Republicans to refine the role the U.S. plays in foreign conflicts, particularly as it works to make the case the world is safer under Republican leadership.

The Heritage Foundation, which Carafano works for, once vocally opposed a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, saying it not only lacked accountability for where dollars were spent—it was too much money from a single source, at a time the country had other issues needing to be dealt with.

According to data compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the U.S. has contributed more than a quarter of the total military aid provided to Ukraine this year, while its humanitarian and financial aid outpaces the entirety of the European Union combined, leaving some contemplating whether other countries should be obligated to pick up more of the tab.

"Republicans are proud of Ukraine. Ukraine's a vital interest, they want to support Ukraine. They're just not excited about a lot of things in how Biden has done it," Carafano said.

"And so I think they feel a big compulsion that they have to refine their talking points so they're making the case that we're for Ukraine, but doesn't mean we're happy with everything Biden has done and that we don't think he should have a blank check. And we do think there should be a strategy and more about what we're actually going to do."

There are some who have walked that line. In the Pennsylvania contest between Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate has been more direct in his support of arming Ukraine. And during a recent campaign appearance in York, he asserted the situation in Ukraine is being closely watched by China as it considers whether to invade Taiwan—showing a broader understanding of the geopolitical risks of playing bystander.

Once vocal proponents of aid to Ukraine appear to have gone quiet on the issue, however, as domestic policy has come to dominate the issues in most races. In the under-the-radar swing state of North Carolina, Republican Senate candidate Ted Budd had voted for Ukrainian aid as a member of Congress, while attacks from his primary opponents for allegedly being "soft" on Russia were found to be false, and based on cherry-picked comments in which Budd is actually critical of the country's president, Vladimir Putin.

He had also personally been sanctioned by Russia and—though he also blamed the country's invasion on Joe Biden's perceived "weakness" early in the war—ultimately voted for an additional $40 billion in Ukrainian aid this past May.

"International thugs like Vladimir Putin will never intimidate me, or the United States of America," he said in a video posted to his Twitter account in April.

Since then, he's gone quiet. According to a Newsweek review of his social media pages, both his campaign and official Twitter and Facebook pages have mentioned Ukraine or Putin zero times. And in a recent rally with Texas Senator Ted Cruz railing against Democrats' "crazy spending," the topic of continuing or discontinuing aid to Ukraine never seemed to come up.

Part of the reason might be a general disinterest in foreign policy by most U.S. voters. Craig Lain, a visiting assistant professor of political science at Elizabethtown College and former foreign affairs officer with the U.S. State Department, told Newsweek that while foreign policy had occasionally reared its head in the Pennsylvania Senate race, it has generally taken a backseat to domestic issues that have allowed them to avoid speculation about what may or may not occur in the next Congress.

"There are other issues Pennsylvanians care more about, i.e., the economy/inflation and crime," Lain said. "It might be more strategic for the conservative candidates to focus on these since the Democrats are vulnerable on both points. Second, in a period of inflation, some voters may not want to support expensive foreign interventions; at this stage, it is hard for anyone to say how much longer we'll need to support Ukraine, both militarily and with humanitarian aid."