Kevin McCarthy threatens to block more US funding for Ukraine

The Republican House speaker has threatened to block further funding for Ukraine as its forces prepare to launch a long-anticipated counter-offensive.

Kevin McCarthy warned on Monday that an extra US spending package for Ukraine is “not going anywhere” in the House of Representatives, halting any immediate plan to send more money to Kyiv.

It came after the Senate passed a debt deal negotiated by Mr McCarthy and President Joe Biden to cut US spending, avoiding a catastrophic default, with the support of defence hawks in the chamber.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act includes $886 billion for defence spending in the next fiscal year, a figure defence hawks in the Senate felt was inadequate.

They supported the deal after assurances by the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, and its top Republican, Mitch McConnell, that it would not prevent them passing separate defence funding bills beyond the agreement’s $886 billion.

However, Mr McCarthy has signalled his chamber has no plans to take up legislation that would boost military aid to Ukraine beyond the levels agreed upon in the deal.

The speaker is under intense pressure from his party’s right flank who are furious that he relied on Democratic votes to secure passage of the spending deal. Some have threatened to revolt and trigger a vote to oust Mr McCarthy from his position in response.

The House’s most Right-wing members have advocated ending military support to Ukraine, lamenting the billions of dollars the US is spending as the American public faces economic uncertainty.

However, in the Senate, there is widespread support among Republicans and Democrats for arming Ukraine.

“I’m not going to prejudge what some of them [in the Senate] do, but if they think they’re writing a supplemental because they want to go around an agreement we just made, it’s not going anywhere,” Mr McCarthy told the political website Punchbowl News.

The speaker suggested additional aid for Ukraine would have to come as part of the annual congressional appropriations process - meaning cutting from other areas of the Pentagon’s budget - to comply with the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

“They’re not going to circumvent what we’re doing here,” he said.

It triggered a furious response from Lindsey Graham, a prominent Republican senator and leading Russia hawk, exposing the depth of the fissure within the GOP over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“That cannot be the position of the Republican Party without some contest here. We’re playing a dangerous game with our national security,” Mr Graham said.

It comes as US officials said it appeared a Ukrainian counter-offensive had begun, with Kyiv’s forces stepping up artillery and ground assaults against occupying Russian forces.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, has warned that defeating the Russian military would take time and come with a heavy cost because Moscow’s air force maintains superiority around the front lines.

When asked if his thinking would change if Ukraine needed a funding boost, Mr McCarthy replied: “You first have to show, what do you need money for? We’ve got... [a] process.”

The Republican divide over Ukraine is reflected among the party’s presidential candidates, with frontrunners Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis expressing scepticism over the size and scale of US funding, while Nikki Haley and Mike Pence have framed continued support as critical to US national interests.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the US National Security Council, said: “We’ve got enough funds to help support Ukraine on the battlefield throughout the rest of this fiscal year.”

Mr Kirby said the White House was assessing what impact an attack on a massive dam in Ukraine would have on “supplemental funding”.

He said: “If we feel like we need to go back to Congress for additional funding for Ukraine, we’ll do that.

“But we’ll do that at the appropriate time, and now is not the appropriate time to have that conversation.”