Closing summary
The White House will step up its engagement with US lawmakers trying to strike a bipartisan deal that would provide military aid for Ukraine and Israel while tightening US border security, a Democratic senator said. “The White House is going to get more engaged this week,” senator Chris Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator, said on NBC News’ Meet the Press.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he held important meetings with the presidents of Paraguay, Uruguay and Ecuador, while he was in Argentina to witness the swearing-in of Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei. Zelenskiy also said he had spoken on the phone with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, updating him on frontline developments and thanking him for France’s military aid.
Overnight, four Ukrainian civilians were killed and seven others injured as a result of strikes on residential areas in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson regions, Gyunduz Mamedov, a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, wrote on X.
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White House to intensify push for Ukraine aid and border security deal, says US senator
The White House will step up its engagement with US lawmakers trying to strike a bipartisan deal that would provide military aid for Ukraine and Israel while tightening US border security, a Democratic senator has said.
Republicans have insisted that additional funding for Ukraine must be paired with major US border security changes.
A bipartisan group of senators trying to broker a compromise have made little progress with less than a week before the US Congress leaves for a Christmas break, according to Reuters.
“The White House is going to get more engaged this week,” senator Chris Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator, said on NBC News’ Meet the Press.
He said it was important to know if Joe Biden would sign any prospective deal.
He said Republicans’ current border security demands were unreasonable and that the party was “playing games with the security of the world” by linking the military aid to US border security measures.
The White House asked Congress to act on a $100bn supplemental funding request in October, arguing that it “advances our national security and supports our allies and partners”.
The request identified border security, allies in the Indo-Pacific, Israel and Ukraine. About $61bn covered money for Ukraine, which included $30bn to restock defence department equipment sent to support the country after Russia invaded in February 2022.
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