Before go to harrys. Com slash a shave to claim your 7 trial im pete muntean at Reagan National airport. This is cnn you are in the cnn newsroom. Im Alex Marquardt and washington. Thank you very much for joining us. We begin with a pivotal vote on capitol hill after months of delays and political wrangling rare saturday session today, house lawmakers passed a 95 billion foreign aid package for israel, ukraine, and taiwan. Republican Speaker Mike Johnson was finally able to advance the bills through congress with the help and must be noted of democrats. Its a move that could cost him his job as some hardliners his party of threatened to introduce a measure to remove him from his speakership the senate is now set to take up that aid package on tuesday, President Biden now urging senators to send the legislation to his desk quickly so that he can sayyed them into law, quote right away. Lets get straight to our correspondence in both jerusalem and kyiv two countries set to benefit directly
Jerusalem fred, i want to start with you. we are talking about more than 60 billion for the ukrainians. they have said time and time again that this is so desperately needed. you ve spent a lot of time on the front lines. how is this going to impact the ukrainian soldiers? well, i think in so many ways, i mean, one of the things that we have to keep in mind, alex, is that over the past couple of months, the ukrainians have been suffering from a severe lack of ammunition on the front lines. in fact, one place that i went to about two months ago near the front lines in the east of the country, near bakhmut. the soldiers there were having to fire smoke shells out of artillery, launching systems. so ones that don t even really explode when they hit targets near, near where the russians are. these weapons had absolutely no effect because the ukrainian simply didn t have enough regular shells to fire at the russians. it s a problem that s been going on for months as this aid has been delay