If Republicans win back Congress in next week’s midterm elections, “not another penny will go to Ukraine,” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told a rally in Sioux City, Iowa on Thursday, accusing the ruling Democratic Party of prioritizing the Ukrainian military over the lives of Americans.
“The only border they care about is Ukraine, not America’s southern border,” Greene declared. “Our country comes first.”
While polls indicate Republicans have a very real chance of taking back the House as well as the Senate, Ukrainian politicians did not seem worried by Greene’s promises.
Sviatoslav Yurash, a member of President Vladimir Zelensky’s Servant of the People Party, told Newsweek on Friday that Greene is “not a lead part of the Republican discussion.”
“The fact that there are extreme right and extreme left in America which have a different point of view is obvious because America is a democracy,” he said. “As far as the mainstream perspective is concerned on both sides of the aisle, support for Ukraine is very clear.”
Insisting Kiev was not asking for “limitless aid,” Yurash argued that the government was “very clear on the point of where [aid] is spent and we are very welcoming to any kind of oversight or missions coming to Ukraine to check and verify on the use of anything.” A recent attempt by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) to include oversight provisions in a $40 billion aid bill, however, was unsuccessful.
Greene is regularly pilloried as an extremist by Democrats for her outspoken opposition to hot-button issues like LGBT kids, gun control, and abortion. She was also one of just 57 representatives to oppose a bill providing $40 billion in aid to Kiev, arguing that only about a third of the weapons sent there actually make it to the front lines, a statistic confirmed by CBS News.
As of August, the US had sent over $54 billion in aid to Ukraine this year. Accompanying the latest announcement of $275 million in advanced weapons systems was an acknowledgement by the State Department that there was a “possibility that criminal and non-state actors may attempt to illicitly acquire weapons from sources in Ukraine.”