President Joe Biden will urge Donald Trump to continue supporting Ukraine amid concerns that the newly elected president could cut military aid to the war-hit country.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during a meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday that Biden will make a final plea to keep the US “in” the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Trump famously vowed to end the war within a day of becoming president and boasted of his “very good relationship” with President Putin, apparently warning him not to escalate the conflict when they met at the meeting on Thursday spoke on the phone.
He has also said the invasion would never have happened if he had been in the White House and has criticized Biden’s level of support for Ukraine.
Now Biden will argue at a meeting to discuss a smooth transition of power that ‘the United States should not leave Ukraine; that walking away from Ukraine means more instability in Europe,” CBS reports.
Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will meet in September at Trump Tower in New York
President Joe Biden speaks during the National Veterans Day Observance at the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery
President Donald Trump meets with Russia’s Vladimir Putin during the G-20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017
Since the start of the war in 2022, the US has been the largest provider of financial and military aid to Ukraine.
Biden is also expected to spend the remaining $6 billion in security aid funds for Ukraine before he leaves the presidency in January.
Britain, France and Germany have already pledged to support Ukraine “as long as necessary” and Zelensky is firmly against ceding territory to Putin.
Last week it emerged that Trump could propose an 800-mile demilitarized zone between Russia and Ukraine as part of a plan to end the war early.
The plans, outlined by three Trump staffers, would see the zone controlled by British and European forces.
It would mean that Russia would maintain its territorial gains in Ukraine while the current border would remain frozen. Kiev should also ensure that it will not join NATO for the next twenty years.
Under the plans, the US would arm Ukraine in exchange for preventing Russia from resuming the war. However, the responsibility for staffing and financing the buffer zone would lie solely with Ukraine’s European allies.
Zelensky (pictured) is firmly against ceding territory to Vladimir Putin
There are fears that US military aid to Ukraine will decrease if Trump becomes president (photo from US military)
Ukrainian soldiers from the 26th Artillery Brigade fire an AHS Krab self-propelled howitzer at Russian positions near the front line in the Khasiv Yar area
“We can provide training and other support, but the barrel of the gun will be European,” a member of Trump’s team told the Wall Street Journal.
“We are not sending American men and women to maintain peace in Ukraine. And we don’t pay for it. Let the Poles, Germans, British and French do it.’
Top Russian official Sergei Shoigu said on Thursday that the situation in the combat zone in Ukraine is not in Kiev’s favor and that the West must accept this and negotiate an end to the conflict, Interfax news agency reported.
“Now that the situation in the field of military operations is not in favor of the Kiev regime, the West is faced with a choice: continue to finance them and destroy the Ukrainian population, or recognize the current reality and start with negotiations’ Shoigu was cited as a witness at a meeting of secretaries of the security councils of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Moscow.
Many analysts have warned that Trump will indeed cut U.S. military aid to Ukraine and force Kiev’s European partners to take on a huge burden to maintain an adequate weapons stockpile — a move that would certainly increase pressure on Zelensky to consider a negotiated solution.
An aerial photo shows the destroyed city of Vovchansk in the Kharkov region, near the border with Russia, on October 2
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Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky accuses the West of ignoring the threat that 11,000 North Korean troops will attack his forces in the war zone
“Trump has a legitimate point that European allies have underperformed on defense and relied on Uncle Sam to protect them for too long, and this is a huge wake-up call for the West,” said Dr. Russell Foster , senior lecturer in British. and International Politics at King’s College London, told MailOnline.
“But Europe, Canada and Australasia have allowed their defense spending to stagnate for so long that they have nowhere near the industrial base and military infrastructure to help defend Ukraine and themselves from further aggression without US help.
‘We are likely to see major calls for defense spending and investment across NATO, but this will take years to build and will be hugely expensive at a time of economic stagnation. The future of Western defense now looks very bleak.”
Ed Arnold, Senior Research Fellow for European Security at the think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), added: ‘The immediate crisis within Europe will be how to continue diplomatic, military and humanitarian support to Ukraine without the US.
“Whatever mechanism comes through – NATO, the EU or bilateral – it will be incredibly expensive.”