The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky met this Thursday with the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, in London, on the first leg of a frenetic European tour that seeks to renew support before the American election.
According to the criteria of
Zelensky was received by the Labor Party’s Starmer at 10 Downing Street, where after a bilateral meeting the new Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance joined the meeting.
Starmer told Rutte that he and Zelensky discussed Ukraine’s “plan for victory,” in its fight against the Russian invasion that began in February 2022.
“The issue here is Ukraine, but also the defense of the West and how we remain secure,” said Rutte, who promised to keep the Ukrainian issue among his priorities and visited kyiv last week, two days after taking office. .
From London, Zelensky will go to Paris to speak this Thursday with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and in the evening he will travel to Rome to meet with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
On Friday morning he will be received by Pope Francis at the Vatican and on the same day he plans to be in Berlin to meet with the chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The German government precisely plans to cut the amount allocated to bilateral military aid to Ukraine by half in 2025.
The European tour, announced on Wednesday night, was preceded by a setback: the postponement of an important meeting of kyiv’s military partners that was to be held on Saturday at the Ramstein base in Germany.
The reason was that the US president, Joe Biden, was forced to postpone his trip to be able to supervise the device deployed against Hurricane Milton in Florida.
A pressing obligation for Biden and a setback for Zelensky, fearful that financial and military aid to Ukraine will be reduced in the event that Republican Donald Trump prevails over Democrat Kamala Harris in the US presidential election on November 5.
The requests that Zelensky will make during his tour
During his tour, The Ukrainian president will reiterate his request for weapons and military equipment, at a very delicate moment for his country.
Not only has the Russian army continued to gain ground on kyiv on the Eastern Front in recent months, but Western aid could also slow down considerably, the German research institute Kiel warned on Thursday.
“Starting next year, Ukraine could face a significant aid deficit,” the institute, which tracks military, financial and humanitarian aid promised and effectively delivered to Ukraine, published in a statement.
A possible electoral victory for Trump “could block future aid plans in Congress,” warned the Kiel Institute.
President Zelensky has put intense pressure on his Western partners in recent months, in this case for their reluctance to deliver long-range missiles, that would allow Ukraine to hit distant targets on Russian territory.
The Ukrainian president wants to develop before his partners his “victory plan”, which according to him could create the conditions for a “just end to the war.”
The plan, currently very vague, should in principle be revealed at a peace summit in the month of November, on a date to be defined.
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