Zelenskiy meets strong resistance in Washington as he seeks more support for Ukraine

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has encountered strong resistance among Republican politicians in Washington in his bid to secure additional support for his country’s war against Russia.

Mr Zelenskiy on Tuesday met congressional leaders on Capitol Hill before holding talks with US president Joe Biden at the White House.

The Biden administration is seeking approval for an additional $60 billion (€56 billion) aid package to Kyiv.

Following the meeting with Mr Zelenskiy, Republican leaders insisted they would not agree to any new aid for Ukraine unless Mr Biden and Democrats agreed to their demands to clamp down on migration at the southern border of the US.

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Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson said he had had a good meeting with the Ukrainian leader and had.reiterated to Mr Zelenskiy that “we stand with him against Putin’s brutal invasion”.

But he hit out at the White House for not setting out its strategy for a Ukrainian victory. “I have asked the White House since the day that I was handed the gavel for clarity. We need a clear articulation of the strategy to allow Ukraine to win.

“Thus far, their responses have been insufficient. They have not provided the clarity and the detail that we requested over and over since literally 24 hours after I was handed the gavel as speaker [on October 25th].”

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Republicans said they wanted policy change to try to stem the numbers of migrants seeking to cross into the US from Mexico.

Mr Johnson said the Biden administration appeared to be seeking additional billions of dollars in aid with no appropriate oversight or clear strategy to win and without providing answers that the American people were owed.

“Our first condition on any national security supplemental spending package is about our own national security”, he said.

In a post on social media, Mr Zelenskiydescribed the closed-door meeting with senators on Capitol Hill as “a friendly and candid conversation”. He thanked senators Chuck Schumer, the Democrat majority leader, and Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, for their personal support for the cause of aiding Ukraine.

Separately, US intelligence has estimated that Russia has lost more than 300,000 troops, either killed or injured since it launched its invasion of Ukraine in February last year.

A newly declassified assessment given to the US Congress said that at the start of the war, the Russian army had about 360,000 troops. It said that Russia had lost 315,000 of those troops, forcing them to recruit and mobilise new recruits and convicts from their prison system.

“The war in Ukraine has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernise its ground force,” the declassified assessment said.

“As of late November, Russia had lost over a quarter of its pre-2022 stockpile of ground forces equipment and has suffered casualties among its trained professional army.”

It said that at the start of the war, Russia had 3,500 tanks but that 2,200 of these had been lost, forcing military authorities to recommission 50-year-old vehicles from storage.

– Reuters

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