The News
US President Joe Biden announced a further package of military aid to Ukraine worth almost $1 billion as his administration rushes to back Kyiv ahead of Donald Trump’s accession in January.
The additional support will provide Ukraine “with more drones, more rockets for its HIMARS [High Mobility Artillery Rocket] systems, and more support for crucial maintenance and sustainment,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Reagan National Defense Forum.
It comes as Trump said Sunday that Kyiv could “possibly” receive less aid when he takes office, and threatened again to leave NATO if other members “don’t pay their bills.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday said he was seeking a ”diplomatic resolution″ to the conflict, but added that he did not believe Putin wanted to end the war and that a “strong” Ukraine was a necessary prerequisite for diplomacy.
SIGNALS
Kyiv’s Western allies are attempting — and possibly failing — to ‘Trump-proof’ Ukraine
The package is designed to support the country’s long-term resistance rather than make an immediate impact on the battlefield, The Associated Press noted. Biden’s critics have accused him of “Trump-proofing” Ukraine, but one “optimistic” scenario could be that the US President-elect’s comments about ending the war quickly turn out to be bluster, a former government official argued in The Hill: If Trump doesn’t bow to Putin for the sake of his legacy, “the Biden-Trump tandem team can each claim their share of credit for a major historic victory,” he wrote. European allies in NATO are feeling more pessimistic, hence their own “Trump-proofing,” but the reality is that Europe’s defense infrastructure is “incomplete” without the US, a columnist argued in Foreign Policy.
Russia’s catastrophic losses haven’t provoked anger over the war
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a rare casualty update Saturday, announcing that some 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Both sides have been reluctant to reveal such figures, but Zelenskyy is thought to have done so in response to Trump’s recent claim that Kyiv had “ridiculously lost” 400,000 soldiers, the BBC noted. Russian sources “generally underestimate” their own losses, according to statisticians writing for the European Consortium for Political Research. Moscow is believed to have suffered catastrophic losses without triggering public discontent or discouraging new recruits: Many of those dying are former convicts and poor volunteers, and Russian society “views it as their choice,” one sociologist told The Guardian.