Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, told Republican senators on Wednesday, March 13, that the House will prepare its own bill to support Ukraine, but in a significantly different form than the one approved by the Senate.
This is reported by The Hill.
Thus, according to the senators who participated in the discussion at the annual meeting of Republicans in the Senate, Johnson announced that the House of Representatives would send the aid package to Ukraine to the Senate, but proposed to make it a loan or leasing program so that American taxpayers would not spend tens of billions of dollars without any expectation of return.
The Speaker also talked about including something similar to the REPO law for Ukrainians, which would allow for the confiscation of russian sovereign assets and the deposit of funds from liquidated assets into a fund to support Ukraine, the senators said.
Notably, Johnson did not say whether such an aid package to Ukraine would include tough border security reforms, such as the "Stay in Mexico" formulation, which could face opposition from Senate Democrats, the publication notes.
Johnson reportedly offered Republican senators a path to help Ukraine the day after he was pressured by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to bring the Senate-passed aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan before the House.
Johnson told reporters during a field meeting of House Republicans that he would "work on an aid package for Ukraine" and said he did not want to allow russian president vladimir putin to capture the country.
"No one wants vladimir putin to win. I believe that he will not stop at Ukraine ... and will go through the whole of Europe. In my opinion, there is good and evil, good against evil, and Ukraine is the victim here," he said.
But he said House Republicans are "working through all the different options right now" and warned that whatever the House passes "may not look exactly like the addition to the legislation in the Senate."
As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, meanwhile, the US Department of State believes that the proposal to provide military aid to Ukraine in the form of loans is unsuccessful.
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