US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Friday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany that President Joe Biden will announce a $250 million military support package for Ukraine.
“We have to hurry, especially as winter approaches,” Austin said at the opening of a meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine's Defense (known as the Ramstein format), which was attended for the first time by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The announcement comes at a difficult time for kyiv, which is trying to maintain its positions in Russia's Kursk region. as Russian forces threaten the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk.
The US Secretary of Defense listed the latest contributions in military support from allies and recalled that since the group's last meeting in June, Washington has committed $4 billion in aid to kyiv. “This group continues to help Ukraine repel Russian aggression today and deter Russian aggression tomorrow,” he said.
Austin, however, said that Ukraine must continue to strengthen its own arms production, for which it will also receive support from the United States and other allies. In this sense, he cited as an example the cooperation that his country provides to Kiev in developing its own substitutes for the S-300 and R-27 missiles or in supplying components for the manufacture of drones and electronic warfare systems. “Aggression continues if it is not stopped,” the Secretary of Defense said.
Zelensky calls for increasing pressure on Putin
Zelensky asked kyiv's allies for more weapons and which allow it to hit targets located throughout Russian territory with long-range weapons to force Russia to end the war. “We need more weapons to expel Russian forces from our territory, especially in the Donetsk region,” the Ukrainian president said on Friday, referring to the situation on the Pokrovsk and Toretsk front lines, where Russia is concentrating its best efforts to advance. “Russian attempts to draw red lines are not working.”
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Berlin has not changed its position on long-range strikes deep into Russian territory. During the meeting, Pistorius announced additional military support for Kiev worth 150 million euros, including the delivery of 12 Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzer launch systems. He also said Germany had already sent 58 Leopard 1 tank models as part of a joint initiative with Denmark, and noted that Berlin was working with the Nordic nation and the Netherlands to get 77 Leopard 1s into the hands of the Ukrainian military as soon as possible.
Other countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada have also announced their commitment to send weapons as part of the meeting.
In contrast, Zelensky assured that Moscow had suffered some 6,000 dead and wounded in a month of Ukrainian operation in Kursk, where kyiv's troops control more than 1,300 square kilometers and a hundred cities.
“Let's make this autumn the moment when Russian aggression will stop, so as to end the war and restore a reliable international security order,” the Ukrainian president said at the opening of the meeting. “We want to end this war, we want peace,” Zelensky said, stressing that it is Russian President Vladimir Putin “who does not want peace and is obsessed with conquering our territory.”
The visit of the Ukrainian head of state to the US Air Force base in Ramstein is unusual and gives a political accent to this meeting of defense ministers who have been meeting periodically since the beginning of the war in a rather working atmosphere to discuss joint efforts to equip Ukraine with war equipment.