The US has pledged to send as much aid as possible to Ukraine before Donald Trump becomes president in January, and warned that security issues around the world were becoming “indivisible” as Russia deepened its alliances with North Korea and Iran.
“Everyone is focused on making sure that Ukraine has what it needs to continue to deal with the ongoing Russian aggression and to put itself in the strongest possible position this year and into next year, making sure that the money, the munitions, the mobilised forces are there,” US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Wednesday at Nato headquarters in Brussels.
“President [Joe] Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20th,” he added, referring to the date of Mr Trump’s inauguration. US officials say more than $7 billion (€6.6bn) in approved military aid has yet to be disbursed to Kyiv.
Ukraine and its allies have no idea how Mr Trump will address Russia’s full-scale war against its pro-western neighbour, which he claims he can stop in one day.
Ukraine has requested urgent reinforcements for its air defences amid nightly Russian drone and missile strikes on its cities and power infrastructure, and urged the West to respond strongly to North Korea’s deployment of thousands of troops to fight alongside Russia’s military after the two states signed a mutual defence pact.
The US and South Korea confirmed Kyiv’s claims that the first clashes between Ukrainian and North Korean troops have taken place in the Russian border region of Kursk, where Ukraine seized some 1,000 square kilometres of territory this summer.
“This is a very significant and very negative development ... North Korea is helping Russia in its aggression against Ukraine. At the same time the support that Russia is providing to North Korea, potentially including support for its nuclear and missile programmes, poses a threat to stability and security in the Korean peninsula,” Mr Blinken said.
“I think we see increasingly the indivisibility of security between the Euro-Atlantic theatre, the Indo-Pacific and Asian Pacific theatres, even the Middle East with the role that Iran plays,” he added, referring to Tehran’s long-standing provision of attack drones and other weapons to Moscow.
Kyiv’s air defences thwarted a combined attack by Russian drones and missiles early on Wednesday, while in occupied Crimea a bomb killed a Russian serviceman in his car.
Ukraine’s SBU security service told media in Kyiv that it carried out the attack and named the dead man as “war criminal” Valery Trankovsky, who was chief of staff of the 41st brigade of Russia’s Black Sea missile ships, which often strike Ukrainian cities.
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