Victoria Spartz, a Republican representative in the House of Representatives of the US Congress, announced that she will not vote for the $60 billion military aid package to Ukraine proposed by the White House. The package was endorsed by the Senate, where the majority belongs to the Democrats, but since the fall of 2023, it has been blocked from being brought to a vote in the House of Representatives, where the majority are Republicans, some of whom, however, are inclined to vote in favor. Nevertheless, it is planned that the vote will finally take place in mid-April.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Victoria Spartz was born and raised in Ukraine. The current congresswoman immigrated to the United States to join her husband in 2000, completed her master's degree there, and before winning the election in her district in the state of Indiana in 2020, she worked in finance, real estate, and agriculture. The WSJ noted that there are eight representatives born in Europe in the House of Representatives, but Spartz is the only one born in the former Soviet republic.
Spartz's biography gave both Democrats and some Republicans hope that she would take an active role in advocating for Ukraine's military needs among her fellow party members. She still has relatives in Ukraine. In particular, the deputy recounted that her 95-year-old grandmother died in 2022 after a russian shelling, which shattered the windows in her apartment.
Immediately after russia's invasion of Ukraine, Spartz did indeed speak out in support of Ukraine, both in the US and among allies in Europe, as noted by the WSJ. She even criticized President Joe Biden's administration for not taking sufficient action to restrain russian president putin, was among those who publicly drew attention to the strengthening cooperation between russia and China, which the US considers its main adversary, and among those who demanded a ban on the import of oil and gas from russia. She supported the previous $40 billion military aid package to Ukraine.
Today, she says she wants to focus not on Ukraine, but on US domestic issues like healthcare, and that the government should pay more attention to domestic issues.