The 2023 budget request the White House will send to Congress on Monday must reflect that “the world is dangerous and getting smaller,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday.
“We have to meet the military requirements that come from being a superpower facing growing threats to our global interests,” McConnell said on the Senate floor as he addressed President Joe Biden’s meetings with European allies.
McConnell said the U.S. needs to increase defense spending and expand inventories of critical weapons to meet the nation’s own security ends and to be a reliable supplier of weapons and munitions to allies. He said the war in Ukraine has highlighted shortcomings in both current stockpiles and in the industrial capacity to produce more quickly.
“Ukrainian forces can win this fight,” he said, “but they need more weapons, more ammunition, more fuel. And they need it all as fast as possible.
Dissident Russian journalist Oksana Bauline killed in Kyiv bombardment
Dissident Russian journalist Oksana Baulina was killed while filming in Kyiv, making her at least the fourth journalist to die in the country during the war. Baulina was working as a correspondent for The Insider when Russian troops shelled a shopping center in the Podil district, a historic neighborhood in Kyiv, the site said in a statement. Another civilian was killed and two more people were wounded and hospitalized.
Baulina had fled Russia but had continued to report on corruption inside the Russian government.
“The Insider expresses its deepest condolences to Oksana’s family and friends,” the statement read.
