today three people are still missing and we re expecting an update any minute from officials. we re following these major developing stories and more all coming in right here to cnn news central. a big vote on capitol hill as soon as tonight. these two republican u.s. senators, florida s rick scott and utah s mitt romney, just told cnn s manu raju, the goal is to get a final vote on that debt ceiling bill tonight. it would go to the president s desk to be signed into law just ahead of that monday deadline or the government would otherwise run out of money to pay its bills. manu raju is on capitol hill covering this from the beginning. is that where the momentum, to get that done tonight so senators can go home for the weekend and don t want to interrupt their weekend plans? yeah, the smells of jet fumes in the air in the senate tonight as a push to get this done is intense. in fact john thune, number two republican who s deep in these negotiations to try to ensure that al
made no major gains. it is quite slow going. there is concern, certainly among ukrainians, among the ukrainian leadership, that that could lead to fatigue. that could lead to a lack of interest. a lead to a fracturization of the nato alliance, and that is certainly something that ukraine is fighting hard against. we know from president biden and others who have said that president putin of russia certainly believes it is in his interests to wait this out. this was a rallying call and a reminder, not just to ukraine and to the rest of the nato alliance but to russia that the alliance is standing firm. i do think that it was notable that there wasn t more of a mention of ukraine. no more direct mentions of what happened over the past two days at the summit in vilnius. the parallels were certainly
authoritarianism, and something that goes beyond, of course, just the borders of ukraine. there is an existential question for the future of europe. for the future of democracy. so i think that that is the message that he sought to drive home here. and this is all in continuation of the message he was sharing today while he was at nato and the conversations that he had with other leaders. clearly this is not a fight. the war in ukraine, that they are going to abandon any time soon. i wrote it down. he said our unity will not falter. so critically important to have a unified nato alliance, g-7, e.u., all of that, the president was talking about because it is so critically important to ukraine right now as well. you re there over at the university where the president just spoke. he was very well received by that crowd that had gathered there. this was clearly a very confident president biden. he stressed this isn t just
one, to russia, you made a bad bet and the u.s. and western allies have ukraine s back even as we ve seen as times volodymyr zelenskyy oscillating between no patience for the time line for getting into nato and the appreciation of everything the western allies have given him. i think it was very interesting to see that. what president biden was chaneling here was the patience the united states ended up showing in the cold war. if you remember during the colder with a, we spent all the time from 1945 to 1989 basically holding course, even though there were some deviations during that period. the basic idea was we will do what we need to do too confront the old soviet union. that same message is what s going on now from biden to putin. he s saying, at this point in time, we are standing with ukraine. that s the conflict between
when they get less weapons, that s less security. all of this nato membership, plan, discussion, a council, a committee about the council, there is a statement that was negotiated behind the scenes. it really doesn t make a difference on the battlefield. of course, zelenskyy will push for that. the cluster bombs, that s security for a lot of ukrainians. if they get the planes, that will be security. so i think one of the things that we re missing from president biden s otherwise well received speech and for ukrainians would be some sort of idea of whether or not that support is coming and whether or not that support will be sustainable. not just for europeans but for americans who are becoming more and more weary of the project. the expensive project in ukraine. did the cluster bombs, the decision is one the u.s. made over its allies. and again the frustration from