What happened
The House on Thursday voted 226 to 195 to provide Ukraine with $1.3 billion in security aid and $8 billion in direct loans while imposing stiff new sanctions on Russia. It was the “most robust aid package to advance in Congress in more than a year,” The Washington Post said, and 18 Republicans joined all but one Democrat to pass the bill “over the objections of the chamber’s GOP leadership” and the White House.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday issued an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin proposing a face-to-face meeting outside of the stalled peace process involving President Donald Trump’s envoys. But “woven into the offer for peace talks were needling remarks” in which he “taunted the Russian leader over wartime setbacks, inflation” and “Putin’s advancing age,” The New York Times said.
Who said what
The House’s “strong show of support for Kyiv” was also a “fresh bipartisan blow” to Trump’s foreign policy, Politico said. Republican leaders had “warned the bill would undermine negotiations” on a peace deal, The Associated Press said. But combined with the House’s Iran war rebuke earlier this week, the Ukraine vote signaled bipartisan “impatience” with Trump’s approach to war and peace.
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What next?
Trump told reporters he was “glad” Zelenskyy had suggested direct talks with Putin and it “would be great” if they met. But it wasn’t clear if Zelenskyy’s letter was “meant to jump-start talks or to denigrate” Putin, the Times said. It “appeared to be at least in part a publicity move” to highlight Kyiv's drone strike outside St. Petersburg and “recent shifts in Ukraine’s favor on the battlefield.”
