Ukrainians and allies descend on Washington with one main goal: Make Republicans listen

  • Ukrainians and their American allies are coming to Washington, DC, this week to meet with lawmakers.

  • The goal is to convince Congress to back President ‘s call for $60 billion more in aid.

  • The advocacy push comes after a majority of House Republicans voted against continued support.

As an exchange student hailing from Kyiv, she was happy to be literally anywhere in America. That her new home would have more cattle than humans — twice as many — was just an inescapable fact, something to process and accept.

“I had no idea what Wyoming was, honestly,” Anastasiia Pereverten told Insider. “At first, I didn’t have any articulate reaction. I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.'” It would be, at the very least, an experience, going from a city of more than 2 million people to a state of fewer than 600,000.

Then, six weeks after she arrived at the University of Wyoming, Pereverten, 21, had to come to terms with the fact that she couldn’t really leave.

In February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including an assault on the capital aimed at decapitating the government, thousands of Kyiv’s residents were forced to seek shelter below ground in the subway system.

“I had a ticket from Denver to Kyiv booked for May,” she said. Instead of flying straight into a war zone, Pereverten stuck around in Laramie, a town of 30,000 people with no public transit to speak of.

It was a cultural shock, but it was also a strategic advantage for Ukraine: Here, in the heart of MAGA country — a state too deeply red, or at least too closely aligned with a former president for even a staunch conservative like Rep. Liz Cheney, was now someone who could rebut, with lived experience, the kind of content often found in conservative media.

When the war broke out, Pereverten recalled, “I found myself in a position where I pretty much had to start advocating because I was the only Ukrainian student on campus and probably one of the very few Ukrainians in the state of Wyoming.” That’s led her to meet with state lawmakers as well as members of Wyoming’s congressional delegation, including Sen. John Barasso, to press the need for more assistance to Ukraine.

This week, Pereverten will be in Washington to do more of the same — at a time when even Republicans who backed aid to Ukraine in the past are starting to say enough is enough. Barasso, for example, recently accused President Joe Biden of ignoring the US-Mexico border “to spend billions on other priorities.”

Pereverten and hundreds of other Ukrainians, Ukrainian-Americans, and their allies plan to romp through Capitol Hill as part of a summit hosted by the American Coalition for Ukraine, an umbrella group that includes organizations such as the Ukrainian American Bar Association, Genocide Watch, and Razom, a nonprofit founded in 2014, the same year that the Kremlin illegally seized Crimea.

“Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine: mass killings, mass rapes, kidnapping and deportation of children,” she said, adding that it won’t end unless it is defeated. “There is definitely a moral obligation to step up for that.”

On Tuesday, people attending the summit have meetings lined up with dozens of lawmakers, during which they will make the pitch for continued support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. Though planned months in advance, the gathering comes at a particularly fraught time: Ukraine’s counteroffensive has not been as successful as some had originally hoped, and public attention is frayed, another war between Israel and Hamas having just begun.

Another battle looms

In September, a CBS News-YouGov poll found that 6 in 10 Republican voters oppose providing any more weapons to Ukraine and half oppose sending any sort of aid at all. More than half of Republicans in the House of Representatives also voted against the most recent $300 million aid package approved just before the fall of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Future support for Ukraine — the Biden administration requested $6 billion — has been a major sticking point in the effort to replace him.

Biden this month said he wants future aid to Ukraine — some $60 billion in total, largely the cost of replacing weapons and ammunition previously transferred to Kyiv — to be part of a package that includes support for Israel and its war against the Hamas militant group in Gaza, a seeming acknowledgment of the difficulties of passing Ukraine aid alone. Since Russia’s invasion, the United States has provided Ukraine with nearly $44 billion in security assistance, much of it in the form of transferred weapons and ammunition, stocks of which now need to be replenished.

Anna Bereznyak, who originally hails from Kyiv, will be coming from Texas. Her own representative in Congress is a Republican who’s been good on Ukraine, she said, but she’s well aware that the wing of the party loyal to former President Donald Trump, which just deposed a Speaker of the House, is in the driver’s seat.

“It’s not a secret that we have different lawmakers with different positions,” Bereznyak said in an interview. Wisdom lies in knowing who is persuadable and who is a waste of time, she added. “You wouldn’t start arguing with the person who told you the Earth is flat, right?”

Bereznyak, in an interview, recounted the shock and horror she felt in February 2022, watching from the suburbs of Austin as Russia launched its all-out attack on her homeland.

“I was terrified,” she said, worried for friends and family living under a barrage of missiles and artillery fire. That feeling has given way, in recent months, to some degree of disappointment in American conservatives, she said, who are betraying their party’s own foundational principles. As she sees it, Ukraine preventing Russia from taking any more land in Europe is of long-term benefit not just to Ukrainians wishing to avoid the horrors of occupation but to Americans, an argument she — as someone invested in the futures of both countries — plans on making to anyone who criticizes the aid.

“I’ll ask a very straight and direct question: Are you saying to people in the United States that their long-term security is not the priority for you right now? Because that is how it sounds to me, as a mother who’s raising two kids who I hope will be living here,” she said. “Because if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, it’ll embolden Russia to take even bigger steps, and it’ll embolden other adversaries.”

That’s an argument that more Republicans made in the past, before concerns over Russian interference abroad, in elections or otherwise, became coded as “liberal” during the Trump era.

“That’s a big puzzle for me because, as far as I know, the Republican Party was formed and stands on the values of freedom. And opposing helping Ukraine to keep their freedom is absolutely [the] opposite,” she said. “So that’s the big question for me: Are those people really Republicans?”

American allies join the fight

Not everyone who plans to advocate for Ukraine this week is from there. From 2010 to 2012 — in other words, just before Russia’s first major military intervention in the country — Paige Barrows taught English in Ukraine as a volunteer with the US Peace Corps.

After the full-scale war broke out last year, people began asking her how to help. She ultimately started raising money herself to provide supplies to civilians and soldiers alike, collecting some $90,000 to date and delivering aid herself earlier this year in a visit that saw her within sight of the front lines. But individual contributions can only go so far: Barrows, who lives in Olathe, Kansas, wants to make sure lawmakers step up and provide billions.

“It’s not a political thing,” Barrows said, or at least it shouldn’t be. “That’s what I try to really emphasize too, that what we tend to hear, here in the US, is the political side of things. What we are kind of deaf to at times is the effect on humanity.”

“A lot of people that I speak with, they say, ‘I just don’t hear anything about it anymore. Is it still going on? Is it still bad?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, gosh, yes. It’s very bad still, and it’s harder now because they’ve been going through this for so long,” she added.

Back in Kansas, Barrows said she sometimes encounters people sharing disinformation about Ukraine. She picks her battles and goes in, respectfully, with lowered expectations. “Is it going to change the way they vote? Probably not. Is it going to keep them from saying negative things in public about Ukraine so that other people can overhear it? Maybe.”

But the real target is not voters, per se, but the people for whom they vote. In the coming days, when she meets with lawmakers in Washington, particularly those on the fence about more funding, Barrows said she will focus more on the pragmatic, arguably “America First” aspects of supporting Ukraine, stressing that this is not a question of being more loyal to one country’s needs over another’s.

“I love being an American, but you can do both. And as an American, we have promised to give everything to Ukraine, everything that it needs to defeat Russia and to get Russia out of Ukraine,” she said.

With the 2024 presidential race just around the corner, and control of Congress once more up for grabs, it’s an open question whether advocates can sway Republicans who have voiced opposition to more aid into supporting a priority of a Democratic White House.

“It’ll be a busy few days,” Barrows said.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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