(CNN) –Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv early Monday, as the future of U.S. aid to Ukraine hangs in the balance in the impending U.S. presidential election and Russia continues to make small but steady gains on the battlefield.
Austin will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov during his visit to Kyiv to discuss Ukraine’s weapons needs and how the United States can continue to support the country’s military over the next year. the secretary told a small group of journalists traveling with him to Kyiv on Sunday night.
The secretary’s visit will also serve as a moment to “step back” and look at the “arc” of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship over the past two and a half years of war, a senior defense official said.
However, it won’t be a victory lap. Ukrainians are in a “very difficult” situation vis-à-vis the Russians heading into winter, the official said.
This is despite the harsh Western sanctions imposed on Russia’s economy in response to its invasion, the billions of dollars in military equipment that the United States sent to Ukraine, and the multinational coalitions that the Biden administration assembled from the early days of the war to help Ukrainian troops repel Russian advances.
According to a CNN producer who was on the scene, loud explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in the early hours of Monday, in a stark illustration of the daily bombings that the country still faces after more than two years. and a half of war in Moscow. City authorities said air defenses had been activated.
Austin, and the Biden administration more broadly, see multinational coalitions as a key aspect of his legacy as defense secretary, particularly the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an alliance of 57 countries and the European Union that Austin first convened. time two months after the start of the war to coordinate immediate military aid to Ukraine.
“It is absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has been able to do what it has done,” Austin told reporters. “It has been able to do so, of course, thanks to the fact that we have supported them from the beginning and have brought together about 50 countries to be part of that support.”
U.S. officials hope the coalitions will endure, but a potential victory for Donald Trump called much of that into question. The former president last month refused to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, describing Zelensky as a “sellout” who “should never have allowed that war to start.”
The senior defense official said the Pentagon is still planning as if the support will continue, and Austin said Friday that “every day we are building long-term capability for Ukraine.”
“None of us are oblivious to political uncertainty in the United States, not even in Ukraine,” the defense official said.
U.S. officials are also confident that bipartisan support for Ukraine will continue in Congress, but that, too, is far from inevitable: There was already a big fight on Capitol Hill this year over approving additional funds for Ukraine, a dispute fueled by Far-right Republicans who oppose aid to Ukraine and whose influence will only grow under a potential Trump administration.
Austin arrived this Monday to a country that is still fighting a brutal fight for its existence. Zelensky ruled out ceding any territory to the Russians and continues to press for Ukraine’s integration into NATO as the best path to victory.
“The first point is an invitation to NATO, now,” Zelensky said, referring to the first point of his “victory plan” that he has presented to the US, Europe and NATO.
But, paradoxically, NATO is unlikely to accept Ukraine as a member while the country is at war.
Ukraine prevented Russian President Vladimir Putin from achieving “a single strategic objective” during the war, Austin said Sunday. But the secretary did not articulate the West’s vision for how Ukraine can win decisively.
Russian troops have continued to occupy Ukrainian territory, are outnumbering the Ukrainians by 3 to 1 on the battlefield and maintain a “significant” advantage in personnel and ammunition, a senior NATO official said last week. Meanwhile, Iran sent Russia three shipments of ballistic missiles this year, and North Korea provided 11,000 containers of ammunition and appears to be preparing to deploy troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine. China also remains a “critical enabler” of Russia’s war effort, the NATO official said.
The war undoubtedly took a heavy toll on Russia, which suffered more than 1,250 daily casualties in September, the highest rate since the war began, the official said. But Moscow is also mobilizing 30,000 new troops per month and manufacturing more than 3 million rounds of ammunition per year, a pace it can likely maintain for at least “the next few years,” the official added.
Ukraine has more sophisticated weaponry thanks to the West, which could give the country a strategic advantage, the defense official said. “In terms of capabilities, Ukraine is in a much stronger position this year than it was a year ago,” the official said. The flow of ammunition donations is also “much steadier” and “more predictable” now, the official added.
But Russia maintains the advantage in terms of personnel mass and ammunition, and the United States is still unwilling to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles provided by the United States to attack Russia’s interior, something Zelensky has repeatedly requested.
Still, Austin said he is confident that the United States and its allies will continue to step up their support for Ukraine next year, regardless of who is in power.
“I believe that allies and partners will continue to rise to the occasion,” he said this Sunday night. “And we have invested in things that will soon bear fruit, in terms of additional systems like NASAMS (surface-to-air missiles). “We made those investments a year and a half, two years ago, and we will soon start to see some of them come to fruition here.”
