American support for prolonging the proxy war in Ukraine by sending endless taxpayer dollars overseas is sinking, a new Gallup poll out Thursday revealed.
A plurality of the Americans surveyed, 41 percent, said the United States is doing “too much” to support the war effort while just 33 percent said American assistance was the “right amount” and 25 percent said support was “too little.”
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, U.S. taxpayers dished out $113 billion in assistance to the war-torn nation last year. In October, President Joe Biden demanded Congress pass a $100 billion combined emergency aid package that earmarked more than $61 billion for Ukraine while reserving Israel and the southern U.S.-Mexico border less than $15 billion each.
In Gallup’s survey, however, which included just more than 2,000 U.S. adults interviewed online between Oct. 4-16, an increasing number of Americans want to the war to end quickly, rather than see a prolonged conflict wherein the Ukrainians reclaim territory. A slight minority, 54 percent, still said they preferred prolonging the war to help Ukraine capture lost territory while 43 percent said they would prioritize ending the war more quickly. Those numbers, however, represent a dramatic shift from 66 percent and 31 percent respectively in August last year.
The survey found skepticism of American aid to Ukraine was highest among Republicans and independents. Republicans were most likely to say U.S. taxpayers were doing “too much” in the effort, followed by independents and then Democrats.
A substantial majority of those surveyed believe the war has reached a stalemate with 64 percent claiming “neither side” in the question of who is winning. Just 20 percent said it was Ukraine, and 14 percent said Russia.
Gallup’s results mirror similar surveys that found rising American skepticism of additional assistance to Ukraine. A CNN poll out in August found a majority of Americans, 55 percent, “say the US Congress should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine” compared to 45 percent who said otherwise. An August Heritage Foundation analysis of the Ukraine aid sent to date found the taxpayer bill came out to $900 per household.
Last week, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to sell Americans on White House plans for new support for Ukraine by celebrating how many of those tax dollars would be going to his friends in the military-industrial complex.
“If you look at the Ukraine assistance,” McConnell said on CBS, “a significant portion of what’s being spent in the United States and 38 different states, replacing the weapons that we send to Ukraine with more modern weapons, so we’re rebuilding our industrial base.”
Only a fraction of what is spent on Ukraine, however, actually flows to American industry.
On Monday, a report from Time Magazine outlined the systemic corruption under Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that continues to plague the war effort. Recruitment is down as government corruption erodes confidence in the regime, with one top Ukrainian presidential official admitting to the paper that “people are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”
While the White House attempts to exploit talks about Israel aid following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks to ram through additional assistance to Ukraine, the newly elected Republican House speaker has pledged to “bifurcate” the aid packages into separate bills.