Former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who now chairs the powerful Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, is taking the Pentagon to task for sitting on $400 million in military aid to Ukraine authorized by Congress.
And he is putting the spotlight on Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, as the most likely obstacle to sending the aid that Republican lawmakers supported last year.
“Republican majorities on both armed services committees authorized $400 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative for each of the next two years. Appropriators fully funded that authorization for fiscal 2026 with overwhelming support,” McConnell wrote in an op-ed published in The Washington Post.
“Yet the Ukraine aid we passed months ago is now collecting dust at the Pentagon,” he added. “When Senate appropriators have sought an explanation from the department’s policy shop, led by Undersecretary Elbridge Colby, they’ve been stonewalled.”
The $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act approved by Congress for fiscal 2026 provided $400 million for Ukraine in 2026 and another $400 million in 2027 through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.
The funding was intended to pay for the production of high-priority weapons by American companies for Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
McConnell noted in his op-ed that Colby, according to media reports, made the decision to suspend arms shipments to Ukraine last year.
“This doesn’t seem to be a first for Colby. Last year, he was reportedly behind the decision to suspend arms shipments to Kyiv — a decision that one source said caught President Donald Trump ‘flat-footed,’” he wrote.
“Colby also determined that security assistance to Ukraine and America’s NATO allies in the Baltics was ‘wasteful’ and removed these long-standing efforts from the fiscal 2026 budget request,” he noted.
McConnell said that Republican majorities in Congress restored the funding because they viewed it as an important investment in national security.
“In the first two years of the full-scale war, support for Ukraine drove billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. defense industrial base,” he wrote.
Even though McConnell viewed President Biden’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “anemic,” he argued that members of the Senate Appropriations Committee were able to pass supplemental funding under Biden to expand production capacity for critical munitions and components.
McConnell also criticized the Defense Department’s leadership for limiting the number of U.S. advisors who are allowed to travel to Ukraine, asserting that policy limits the Pentagon’s ability to learn about battlefield innovations.
“I know … officers who are eager to apply Ukrainians’ counter-drone and electronic warfare lessons to the U.S. Army’s preparations for future conflicts. They can’t learn from a war, however, if they can’t properly observe it,” he wrote.
“The Pentagon nevertheless continues a Biden administration policy of significantly capping the number of military trainers authorized to assist Ukraine and witness the conflict up close,” he added.
Meanwhile, McConnell said, America’s adversaries, such as Iran, have been eager to learn new tactics from Ukraine’s battlefields.
“They are learning and adapting. Iran has made that painfully clear in its attacks on U.S. personnel and facilities in the Persian Gulf, which applied drone capabilities honed by Russia with deadly effect,” he wrote. “North Korea has likewise gotten involved, sending troops to Russia not out of charity but for tactical experience and closer alignment with Moscow.”
And McConnell warned that China is “doubtless watching events in Ukraine” as it crafts its military investments and plans.
Yet, he lamented “the Pentagon still won’t tell us why it hasn’t obligated and executed modest Ukraine investments.”
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