U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv early Monday morning, as the future of US aid to Ukraine hangs in the balance of the imminent US presidential election and as Russia continues to make small but steady gains on the battlefield, APA reports citing CNN.
Austin will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov while in Kyiv to discuss Ukraine’s weapons needs and how the US can continue to support the country’s military over the next year, the secretary told a small group of reporters traveling with him to Kyiv on Sunday night.
The secretary’s visit will also serve as a moment for him to “step back” and look at the “arc” of the US-Ukraine relationship over the last two and a half years of war, a senior defense official said.
Austin, and the Biden administration more broadly, sees multinational coalitions as a key aspect of his legacy as defense secretary, particularly the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — an alliance of 57 countries and the European Union that Austin first convened two months into the war to coordinate immediate military aid to Ukraine.
“It’s been absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has been able to do what it’s done,” Austin told reporters. “It’s been able to do that, of course, because of the fact that we have supported them from the very beginning, and we’ve rallied some 50 countries to be a part of that support.”
US officials hope the coalitions will endure, but a potential Donald Trump victory has thrown much of that into doubt. The former president declined last month to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, and he has described Zelensky as a “salesman” who “should never have let that war start.”
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