A majority of Americans do not want the United States to continue sending aid to Ukraine as its war against Russia nears the year-and-a-half mark, according to a CNN poll released Friday.
Of the more than 1,200 adult respondents to the poll conducted by SSRS, 55% said Congress should not approve additional funding to Ukraine, while 45% supported more funding. Most Americans (51%) also said that the U.S. has already done enough to support the Ukrainian effort while 48% said the U.S. should do more. The findings mark a drastic reversal of a CNN poll conducted shortly after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, which found that 62% of Americans wanted the U.S. to do more to help Ukraine.
In the first year of the conflict, Congress approved roughly $113 billion in aid to Ukraine — far more than any other country. Last month, the State Department announced that another $400 million in arms and equipment would be sent to Ukraine, including cluster bombs. The bombs are banned by most countries in the world due to the view that they are inhumane because of high failure rates and unexploded fragments that can linger for years, according to the BBC.
The new CNN poll, conducted throughout July and featuring an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, showed a partisan divide on continued aid for Ukraine with 71% of Republicans opposing more funding for the European country compared to 62% of Democrats who want the U.S. to send more assistance. Among liberal Democrats, 74% support additional funding to Ukrainian forces while 51% of moderate Democrats say the same. Conservative Republicans were the most likely to oppose any further assistance to Ukraine with 76% opposing any more funding for the country.
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A majority of Democrats support providing weapons to Ukraine compared to just 39% of independents and 30% of Republicans, the poll found. Americans from across the political spectrum widely agree that the U.S. should not send its own forces into Ukraine. Only 20% of all the respondents said they support such an escalation, broken down to 19% of Democrats, 18% of independents, and 16% of Republicans.
Less than half of Americans (45%) approve of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Ukraine-Russia war, and even less (43%) approve of how he is handling U.S.-Russia relations, according to the poll. The president has repeatedly said that the U.S. will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”