US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will travel to France next week where he will meet with President Emmanuel Macron to discuss support for Ukraine, the State Department said today.
The trip comes amid escalating Russian strikes on Ukraine and at a time when Kiev is asking its Western allies for more advanced Patriot air defense systems.
On the American side, tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine are currently blocked by Republican opposition in Congress.
“In Paris, the Secretary of State will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss support for Ukraine and efforts to prevent an escalation of the conflict in Gaza,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
It will be a rare visit to Paris by the US secretary of state, who speaks fluent French and has not been to France in nearly two years.
The French president, for his part, made an official visit to Washington in December 2022.
After Paris, Blinken will travel to Brussels on Wednesday to attend a meeting of his NATO counterparts on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Alliance on April 4, Miller added.
The meeting is expected to serve specifically to prepare the Alliance leaders’ summit in Washington in July.
Blinken will also hold a tripartite meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and European Union leaders on the sidelines of that meeting, according to his spokesman.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are two former Soviet republics that fought each other in two wars in the early 1990s and 2020s over control of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was finally handed to Baku in September 2023.
In recent months, several rounds of negotiations have not borne fruit.
Blinken will also participate in a US-EU Council on Trade and Technology in Leuven, Belgium.
Source: RES-MPE
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