Smoke rises from a building in Bakhmut, site of the heaviest battles with the Russian troops in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. Photo / AP
At about 2am last Wednesday NZT, Republican Senator Ron Johnson stood on the United States Senate floor and explained why he opposed sending more aid to help Ukraine fend off the invasion launched in 2022 by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I don’t like this reality,” Johnson said. “Vladimir Putin is an evil war criminal.” But he quickly added: “Vladimir Putin will not lose this war”.
That argument — that the Russian president cannot be stopped so there’s no point in using American taxpayer dollars against him — marks a new stage in the Republican Party’s growing acceptance of Russian expansionism in the age of Donald Trump.
The GOP has been softening its stance on Russia ever since Trump won the 2016 election following Russian hacking of his Democratic opponents.
There are several reasons for the shift. Among them, Putin is holding himself out as an international champion of conservative Christian values and the GOP is growing increasingly sceptical of overseas entanglements. Then there’s Trump’s personal embrace of the Russian leader.
Now the GOP’s ambivalence on Russia has stalled additional aid to Ukraine at a pivotal time in the war.
The Senate last week passed a foreign aid package that included US$61 billion for Ukraine on a 70-29 vote, but Johnson was one of a majority of the Republicans to vote against the bill after their late-night stand to block it.
In the Republican-controlled House, Speaker Mike Johnson said his chamber would not be “rushed” to pass the measure, even as Ukraine’s military warns of dire shortages of ammunition and artillery.
Many Republicans are openly frustrated that their colleagues don’t see the benefits of helping Ukraine. Putin and his allies have banked on democracies becoming weary of aiding Kyiv, and Putin’s GOP critics warn that Nato countries in eastern Europe could become targets of an emboldened Russia that believes the US won’t counter it.
“Putin is losing,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis said on the floor before Johnson’s speech. “This is not a stalemate.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was one of 22 Republican senators to back the package, while 26 opposed it.
The divide within the party was on stark display at the weekend with the prison death of Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption advocate Alexei Navalny, which US President Joe Biden and other world leaders blamed on Putin. Trump notably stood aside from that chorus today in his first public comment on the matter that referred to Navalny by name.
Offering no sympathy or attempt to affix blame, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”
Nikki Haley, his Republican presidential primary rival, said that Trump is “siding with a thug” in his embrace of Putin.
Tillis responded to Navalny’s death by saying in a post, “History will not be kind to those in America who make apologies for Putin and praise Russian autocracy”.
Johnson, the House Speaker, issued a statement calling Putin a “vicious dictator” and pledging that he “will be met with united opposition”, but he did not offer any way forward for passing the aid to Ukraine.
Within the Republican Party, sceptics of confronting Russia seem to be gaining ground.
“Nearly every Republican Senator under the age of 55 voted NO on this America Last bill,” Senator Eric Schmitt, elected in 2022, posted on X (Twitter) after the vote last week. He added: “15 out of 17 elected since 2018 voted NO. Things are changing just not fast enough”.
Those who oppose additional Ukraine aid bristle at charges that they are doing Putin’s handiwork. They contend they are taking a hard-headed look at whether it’s worth spending money to help the country.
“If you oppose a blank [cheque] to another country, I guess that makes you a Russian,” Senator Tommy Tuberville said on the Senate floor, after posting that conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s recent controversial interview of Putin shows that “Russia wants peace” in contrast to “DC warmongers”.
Representative Matt Gaetz, a leading opponent of Ukraine aid in the House, described the movement as “a generational shift in my party away from neoconservatism toward foreign policy realism”.
In interviews with voters waiting to see Trump speak on Sunday in Waterford Township, Michigan, none praised Putin. But none wanted to spend more money confronting him, trusting Trump to handle the Russian leader.
Even before Trump, Republican voters were signalling discontent with overseas conflicts, said Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Cornell University. That’s one reason Trump’s 2016 promise to avoid “stupid wars” resonated.
“Some of it may be a bottom-up change in a key part of the Republican base,” Kriner said, “and part of it reflects Trump’s hold on that base and his ability to sway its opinions and policy preferences in dramatic ways.”
Trump has long praised Putin, calling his invasion of Ukraine “smart” and “savvy”, and recalling this month that he had told Nato members who didn’t spend enough on defence that he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to them. He reiterated that threat days later.
Despite the reluctance within the GOP to continue supporting Ukraine, Russia remains deeply unpopular in the US. A July 2023 Gallup poll found that just 5 per cent had a favourable view of Putin, including 7 per cent of Republicans.
But Putin has positioned his country as a symbol of Christian conservatism and resistance to LGBTQ rights, while portraying himself as an embodiment of masculine strength. The combination has appealed to populist conservatives across the Western world.
Putin’s appeal in some sectors of the right is demonstrated by Carlson’s recent tour of Russia, after which the conservative host posted videos admiring the Moscow subway and a supermarket that he says “would radicalise you against our leaders”.
“The goal of the Soviet Union was to be the beacon of left ideas,” said Olga Kamenchuk, a professor at Northwestern University. “Russia is now the beacon of conservative ideas.”
Kamenchuk said this is most visible not in Putin’s US poll numbers, but in fading Republican support for Ukraine. About half of Republicans said the US is providing “too much” support to Ukraine when it comes to Russia’s invasion, according to a Pew Research poll in December. That’s up from 9 per cent in a Pew poll taken in March 2022, just weeks after Russia invaded.
When Putin attacked Ukraine, there was bipartisan condemnation. Even a year ago, most Republicans in Congress pledged support. But around the same time, Trump was lamenting that US leaders were “suckers” for sending aid.
By the northern autumn, the party was divided. Republicans refused to include another round of Ukraine funding in the government spending bill, insisting that Democrats needed to include a border security measure to earn their support.
After Trump condemned the compromise border proposal, Republicans sank the bill, leaving Ukraine backers with no option but to push the assistance as part of a foreign aid package with additional money for Israel and Taiwan.
Several experts on Russia note that the rhetoric the GOP uses against Ukraine aid can mirror Putin’s own — that Ukraine is corrupt and will waste the money, that the US can’t afford to look beyond its borders and that Russia’s victory is inevitable.
“He’s trying to create the perception that he’s never going to be beaten, so don’t even try,” Henry Hale, a George Washington University political scientist, said of Putin.
Sceptics of Ukraine aid argue the war has already decimated the Russian military and that Putin won’t be able to target other European countries.
“Russia has shown in the last two years that they do not have the ability to march through Western Europe,” said Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget who is now president of the Centre for Renewing America, which opposes additional Ukraine funding.
But several experts noted that Putin has alluded to plans to retake much of the former Soviet Union’s territory, which could include Nato countries such as Lithuania and Estonia that the US is obligated under its treaty to defend militarily.
Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, noted that Russia for decades has hoped the US would lose interest in protecting Europe: “This was Stalin’s dream, that the US would just retreat to the Western hemisphere”.
It comes after Iran’s missiles hit Soroka Hospital, leaving it in flames.