Ukraine:

US President Joe Biden announced a $425 million arms package for Kyiv Wednesday in a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, ahead of a farewell visit to Berlin to discuss Ukraine, the White House said.

The package includes air defense and armored vehicles, said a readout of the call, adding that President Biden had briefed Mr Zelensky “on his efforts to surge security assistance to Ukraine over the remainder of his term in office.”

Mr Biden would also hold a virtual meeting of Ukraine’s allies in November, it added, as he tries to shore up international support for Kyiv before a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025.

There was no mention, however, of any decision on whether to allow Ukraine to fire Western-made long-range missiles deep into Russia, a move Biden has been reluctant to green-light so far.

The $425 million US package includes “additional air defense capability, air-to-ground munitions, armored vehicles, and critical munitions to meet Ukraine’s urgent needs,” the White House said.

The United States would in coming months provide hundreds of air defense missiles, artillery, hundreds of armored personnel carriers and thousands of additional armored vehicles, it added.

Mr Zelensky meanwhile “updated President Biden on his plan to achieve victory over Russia, and the two leaders tasked their teams to engage in further consultations on next steps.”

Mr Zelensky said on X that he had spoken with Biden and thanked him for the package, which included “long range weapons.”

“I am grateful to President Biden, both parties in Congress, and the American people for the $425 million defense package announced today,” said Ukraine President, who is due to meet EU leaders on Thursday.

The United States has provided around $175 billion in both military and economic assistance to Ukraine during the war, despite frequent opposition from Republicans.

The call came on the eve of Mr Biden’s whirlwind trip to Germany, where Ukraine will be high on the agenda.

Mr Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz could be joined for talks by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, media reports said.

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(L-R) U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov attend a Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting on September 6, 2024 at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, southwestern Germany.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met Friday with top United States military leaders and more than 50 partner nations in Germany to press for more weapons support Friday as Washington announced it would provide another $250 million in security assistance to Kyiv.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the meeting of the leaders was taking place during a dynamic moment in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, as it conducts its first offensive operations of the war while facing a significant threat from Russian forces near a key hub in the Donbas.

So far the surprise assault inside Russia’s Kursk territory has not drawn away President Vladimir Putin’s focus from taking the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, which provides critical rail and supply links for the Ukrainian army. Losing Pokrovsk could put additional Ukrainian cities at risk.

While Kursk has put Russia on the defensive, “we know Putin’s malice runs deep,” Mr. Austin cautioned in prepared remarks to the media before the Ukraine Defense Contact Group met. Moscow is pressing on, especially around Pokrovsk, Mr. Austin said.

Recent deadly airstrikes by Russia have renewed Mr. Zelensky’s calls for the U.S. to further loosen restrictions and obtain even greater Western capabilities to strike deeper inside Russia. However, the meeting Friday was expected to focus on resourcing more air defense and artillery supplies and shoring up gains on expanding Ukraine’s own defense industrial base, to put it on more solid footing as the final days of Joe Biden’s U.S. presidency wind down.

Mr. Zelensky said he would continue to press for the long-range strike capability. “Strong long-range decisions by partners are needed to bring the just peace we seek closer,” Mr. Zelensky said Friday on Telegram.

Western partner nations were working with Ukraine to source a substitute missile for its Soviet-era S-300 air defense systems, Mr. Austin said.

The U.S. is also focused on resourcing a variety of air-to-ground missiles that the newly delivered F-16 fighter jets can carry, including the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, which could give Ukraine a longer-range cruise missile option, said Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, who spoke to reporters traveling with Mr. Austin.

No decisions on the munition have been made, LaPlante said, noting that policymakers would still have to decide whether to give Ukraine the longer-range capability.

“I would just put JASSM in that category, it’s something that is always being looked at,” LaPlante said. “Anything that’s an air-to-ground weapon is always being looked at.”

For the past two years, members of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group have met to resource Ukraine’s mammoth artillery and air defense needs, ranging from hundreds of millions of rounds of small arms ammunition to some of the West’s most sophisticated air defense systems, and now fighter jets. The ask this month was more of the same — but different in that it was in person, and followed a similar in-person visit Thursday in Kyiv by Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer as Mr. Zelensky shores up U.S. support before the administration changes.

Since 2022, the member nations together have provided about $106 billion in security assistance to Ukraine. The U.S. has provided more than $56 billion of that total.

The German government said Chancellor Olaf Scholz plans to meet Mr. Zelensky in Frankfurt on Friday afternoon.

Victoria Spartz. File
| Photo Credit: AP

A Ukrainian-born congresswoman who recently opposed sending aid to her war-torn country is defending her seat on May 7 against a fellow Republican who has outpaced her in spending and fundraising.

U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz is the first and only Ukrainian-born House member and previously backed support for the country. But ahead of her primary contest, she reversed her position and voted against sending $61 billion in aid to Ukraine. She defended the switch, arguing her loyalty is to America first and that she wanted to see policy on the U.S.-Mexico border included in the aid package, a position largely shared by her Republican challengers.

The election in the northern suburbs of Indianapolis will determine whether Ms. Spartz’s maneuvers will pay off. More broadly, the race is a barometer of whether support for Ukraine is a powerful issue among GOP voters. The issue has become an increasingly divisive topic among Republicans in Washington, where many are pressing for a drawdown in aid.

If she’s defeated, Ms. Spartz would be the first House Republican to lose a primary this year in a race that wasn’t affected by redistricting.

The primary marks the latest twist in Ms. Spartz’s political career. She won a tight primary race in 2020 and wasn’t challenged for the GOP nomination in 2022. She initially planned to leave Congress last year, opting against reelection to her House seat and forgoing a chance to seek the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Mike Braun.

She later reversed course, deciding to seek another term in the House. But her shifting plans gave an opening to state Rep. Chuck Goodrich to outraise Spartz by millions of dollars and become her main competitor in the primary.

Statewide, presumptive Pesidential nominees former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden seek to pile up more delegates heading to their respective party conventions later this summer. Mr. Trump took Indiana by 16 points in 2020. The only question on the GOP side is how many votes will go to former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who is still on the primary ballot after dropping out of the race in March.

Indiana voters do not have the option to vote “ uncommitted.” The protest-vote movement in some states against Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war has cast doubt on the President’s Democratic support in November.

The most watched and expensive contest within the state is the six-way race to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb. Braun is considered the race’s front-runner, bolstered by several advantages: name recognition, money and Mr. Trump’s endorsement. He spent more than $6 million in the first three months of 2024 alone.

Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch has campaigned to slash the state’s income tax. Also running are two former commerce secretaries, Brad Chambers — who has contributed $10 million to his campaign — and Eric Doden.

Once seen as a probable Hoosier State governor, former Attorney General Curtis Hill has struggled to compete. Political novice Jamie Reitenour is also on the ballot. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick is uncontested.

The Senate has passed $95 billion in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden after months of delays and contentious debate over how involved the United States should be in foreign wars.

The bill passed the Senate on an overwhelming 79-18 vote late on April 23 after the House had approved the package on April 20. Mr. Biden, who worked with congressional leaders to win support, is expected to quickly sign the legislation and start the process of sending weapons to Ukraine, which has been struggling to hold its front lines against Russia. The legislation would also send $26 billion in wartime assistance to Israel humanitarian relief to citizens of Gaza, and $8 billion to counter Chinese threats in Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific.

U.S. officials said about $1 billion of the aid could be on its way shortly, with the bulk following in coming weeks.

In an interview with The Associated Press shortly before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that if Congress hadn’t passed the aid, “America would have paid a price economically, politically, militarily.”

“Very few things we have done have risen to this level of historic importance,” he said.

On the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer said the Senate was sending a message to U.S. allies: “We will stand with you.”

Mr. Schumer and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made passage of the legislation a top priority, agreeing to tie Ukraine and Israel aid to help ensure passage and arguing there could be dire consequences for the United States and many of its global allies if Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression is left unchecked. They worked with House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, to overcome seemingly intractable Republican opposition to the Ukraine aid, in particular — eventually winning large majorities in both chambers.

Mr. McConnell said in a separate interview before the vote that it “is one of the biggest days in the time that I’ve been here.”

“At least on this episode, I think we turned the tables on the isolationists,” Mr. McConnell said.

The House approved the package in a series of four votes on April 20, with the Ukraine portion passing 311-112.

The $61 billion for Ukraine comes as the war-torn country desperately needs new firepower and as Russian President Vladimir Putin has stepped up his attacks. Ukrainian soldiers have struggled as Russia has seized the momentum on the battlefield and gained significant territory.

Mr. Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on April 22 the U.S. will send badly needed air defense weaponry as soon as the legislation is passed.

“The President has assured me that the package will be approved quickly and that it will be powerful, strengthening our air defence as well as long-range and artillery capabilities,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Monday.

To gain more votes, Republicans in the House majority also added a bill to the foreign aid package that could ban the social media app TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owners do not sell their stake within a year. That legislation had wide bipartisan support in both chambers.

The TikTok bill was one of several tweaks Johnson to the package the Senate passed in February as he tried to move the bill through the House despite significant opposition within his conference. Other additions include a stipulation that $9 billion of the economic assistance to Ukraine is in the form of “forgivable loans”; provisions that allow the U.S. to seize frozen Russian central bank assets to rebuild Ukraine; and bills to impose sanctions on Iran, Russia, China and criminal organizations that traffic fentanyl.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime hawk who voted against the foreign aid package in February because it wasn’t paired with legislation to stem migration at the border, was one of the Republicans who switched their votes. “If we don’t help Ukraine now, this war will spread, and Americans who are not involved will be involved,” Ms. Graham said.

The package has had broad congressional support since Biden first requested the money last summer. But congressional leaders had to navigate strong opposition from a growing number of conservatives who question U.S. involvement in foreign wars and argue that Congress should be focused instead on the surge of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican who is a close ally to Donald Trump, said that despite the strong showing of support for funding Ukraine’s defense, opposition is growing among Republicans.

“The United States is spread too thin,” Mr. Vance said, “And that that argument I think, is winning the American people and it’s slowly winning the Senate, but it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The growing fault line in the GOP between those conservatives who are skeptical of the aid and the more traditional, “Reagan Republicans” who strongly support it may prove to be career-defining for the two top Republican leaders.

Mr. McConnell, who has made the Ukraine aid a top priority, said last month that he would step down from leadership after becoming increasingly distanced from many in his conference on the Ukraine aid and other issues. Mr. Johnson, who said he put the bills on the floor after praying for guidance, faces threats of an ouster after a majority of Republicans voted against the aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Johnson said after House passage that “we did our work here, and I think history will judge it well.”

Opponents in the Senate, like the House, included some left-wing senators who are opposed to aiding Israel as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has bombarded Gaza and killed thousands of civilians. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, voted against the package.

“We must end our complicity in this terrible war,” Mr. Sanders said.

Moscow:

Russia said on Sunday US lawmakers’ support for $60.84 billion more in aid for Ukraine showed that Washington was wading much deeper into a hybrid war against Moscow that would end in humiliation on a par with the Vietnam or Afghanistan conflicts.

President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has touched off the worst fall-out in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and U.S. diplomats.

On Saturday, the US House of Representatives passed with broad bipartisan support a $95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, over bitter objections from some far-right Republicans.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was clear that the United States wanted Ukraine “to fight to the last Ukrainian” including with attacks on Russian sovereign territory and civilians.

“Washington’s deeper and deeper immersion in the hybrid war against Russia will turn into a loud and humiliating fiasco for United States such as Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova said.

Russia, she said, will give “an unconditional and resolute response” to the U.S. move to get more involved in the Ukraine war.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns warned last week that without more U.S. military support Ukraine could lose on the battlefield, but that with support Kyiv’s forces could hold their own this year.

The United States has repeatedly ruled out sending its own or other NATO-member troops to Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding artillery and drone war with Russia along a heavily fortified 1,000-km (600-mile) front.

The United States lost more than 58,000 military personnel in the 1955-75 Vietnam War, which ended with Communist North Vietnam’s victory and takeover of the South, while hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.

In the 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan, the U.S. reported 2,459 dead and over 20,000 wounded in the conflict which ended with the withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces and return to power of the Islamist Taliban movement.

The Soviet Union lost 14,453 personnel in the 1979-1989 war in Afghanistan. Civilian deaths in both the wars in Afghanistan were vast.

UKRAINE WAR

Russia now controls about 18% of Ukraine – in the east and south of its neighbour – and has been incrementally gaining ground since the failure of Kyiv’s 2023 counter-offensive to make any serious inroads against Russian troops dug in behind minefields patrolled by drones and guarded by heavy artillery.

Ukraine has for months been begging the United States to release more money and weapons to help it fight, though Russian officials have asserted that U.S. aid will not change the ultimate course of the war.

Zakharova said that ordinary Ukrainians were being “forcibly driven to slaughter as “cannon fodder” but that the United States was now no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia. Washington, she said, was hoping Ukraine could hold on until the U.S. presidential election in November.

The U.S. legislative package includes measures that would allow the U.S. to seize billions of dollars’ worth of Russian assets frozen by sanctions imposed on Moscow. That, said Zakharova, was simply “theft”, adding that the true beneficiaries of the whole package were U.S. defence companies.

The leaders of the West and Ukraine have cast the war in Ukraine as an imperial-style land-grab showing that post-Soviet Russia is one of the top two biggest nation-state threats to global stability, alongside China.

Putin presents the war as part of a much broader struggle with the U.S., which he says ignored Moscow’s interests after the Soviet Union’s 1991 break-up and then plotted to cleave Russia apart and grab its natural resources.

The West denies that it wants to destroy Russia, which in turn denies that it intends to invade any NATO member state.

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday that US House of Representatives’ approval of security aid to Ukraine would lead to more damage and deaths in the conflict there.

The decision “will make the United States of America richer, further ruin Ukraine and result in the deaths of even more Ukrainians, the fault of the Kyiv regime,” Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

The Kremlin has been locked in conflict in Ukraine since invading it more than two years ago.

The House approved a legislative package providing $60.84 billion to Ukraine, including $23 billion to replenish US weapons, stocks and facilities.

The package now goes to the US Senate, which passed a similar measure two months ago, for expected approval next week. It then is passed on to President Joe Biden to sign.

Peskov also said that provisions in the legislation allowing the US administration to confiscate seized Russian assets and transfer them to Ukraine to fund reconstruction would tarnish the image of the United States.

Russia, he said, would enact retaliatory measures.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the approval of US aid for Ukraine was expected and grounded in “Russophobia”.

“We will, of course, be victorious regardless of the bloodsoaked $61 billion, which will mostly be swallowed up by their insatiable military industrial complex,” wrote Medvedev, one of Russia’s most vociferous hawks as deputy chairman of the Security Council.

Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the approval of aid in the legislation to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan would “deepen crises throughout the world”.

“Military assistance to the Kyiv regime is direct sponsorship of terrorist activity,” Zakharova wrote on Telegram.

“To Taiwan, it is interference in China’s internal affairs. To Israel, it is a road straight to escalation and an unprecedented rise in tension in the region.”

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that Kyiv will lose the war against Russia if the US Congress does not approve military aid to battle Moscow’s invasion.

Republicans in Congress have been blocking tens of billions of dollars in military assistance for Kyiv for months.

“It is necessary to specifically tell Congress that if Congress does not help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war,” Zelensky said during a video meeting of Kyiv-organised fundraising platform United24.

Zelensky said it would be “difficult” for Ukraine to “stay” (survive) without the aid.

He said that “if Ukraine loses the war, other states will be attacked.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dragged on for more than two years.

Kyiv said Sunday that a Russian strike on the town of Gulyaipole in the southern Zaporizhzhia region killed three people.

“Two men and a woman died under the rubble of their own private house, which was hit by a Russian shell,” the head of the region, Ivan Fedorov, said on social media.

Officials said another civilian, a woman, was killed in the city of Kupiansk, in the northeastern Kharkiv region that has seen increased attacks in recent months.

“A woman died under the rubble in an apartment on the fourth floor of a high-rise building,” Ukraine’s state emergency services said, adding that it was a residential building.

Authorities in the main city of Kharkiv said Russia launched another attack on Sunday, wounding five civilians, a day after a deadly attack there.

Russia, meanwhile, said it had destroyed 15 Ukrainian drones over its border Belgorod and Bryansk regions, reporting the death of a young woman.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said shrapnel hit a car with a family of six inside in the village of Shagarovka, some 35 kilometres (20 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, a girl died,” Gladkov said, without specifying whether she was a minor. “She died from her wounds on the spot.”

Gladkov said her father had a head wound and that two children were taken to hospital.

The Russian army said it had destroyed 12 Ukrainian drones over the Belgorod region and three over the Bryansk region — both territories have been regularly targeted by Kyiv.

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Kyiv:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that Ukraine’s armed forces had used US-supplied ATACMS long-range missiles for the first time.

“They have performed very accurately. ATACMS have proven themselves,” he said in an evening address posted on social media, without giving details of when or where they were used.

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