Ukraine’s president warns in Washington that aid for his country “is not charity but a global investment in security and democracy”
The Kremlin lashed out at the United States yesterday, barely a day after its president, Joe Biden, received his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodimir Zelensky, in Washington for a visit with honors during which he gave a solemn speech in Congress. According to the spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dmitri Peskov, the visit showed that the White House is carrying out in the former Soviet republic a “‘de facto’ and indirect war” against Russia in which the tenant of the Oval Office is willing to use ” to the last Ukrainian”.
Peskov also missed that the two leaders will talk about military and economic support, but they would not have focused their interview on building “true calls for peace.” The spokesman concluded that Biden and Zelensky have no intention of “listening” to the Kremlin and denounced Ukraine’s “continuous bombardments” of Donbas that destroy the buildings where the pro-Russian population lives.
The accusation that the US is behind the war is not new, but on this occasion Peskov took advantage of three reasons to support it: the apparent good harmony between the two presidents, Biden’s promise that his country will offer all the necessary help to kyiv in its confrontation with Moscow and the fact that Zelenski returns to the Ukraine with the guarantee of taking the American Patriot batteries with which he hopes to counter the bombing of its civilian infrastructure.
All of this also led yesterday the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoli Antonov, to assert that the Zelensky government “is not ready for peace” and is increasingly responding to a greater extent “to Washington’s needs.” Antonov referred to the dispatch of the Patriots, decided by the US despite the Kremlin’s “repeated appeals to common sense”, and warned that this type of “provocative action inevitably leads to an escalation of consequences that are difficult to imagine.”
The Ukrainian leader expressed his appreciation to Congress for the US support and especially appreciated the role of this country in the defense of Ukraine. A day later, the European Union formally invited him to “visit” Brussels and recalled that on February 3 there will be a summit on the former republic, although it is an “open invitation” at any other time. Despite the immediacy of his press release, the EU’s External Action Service separated him yesterday from the expedition to Washington and downplayed the fact that Zelenski had traveled to the United States and not to Brussels, understanding that everyone goes “of the hand” in support of the invaded ex-republic. Foreign Affairs spokesman Peter Stano declared that the president does not need to travel to member states “because the EU goes to him regularly and repeatedly.”
In Congress
For the first time since Russia invaded his country on February 24, Zelensky left Ukraine on Wednesday for something more important than his own life: convince the US Congress to continue investing in the war, for which the Senate hopes approve this weekend another gigantic game of 44,000 million dollars.
After the loss of the Lower House by the Democratic Party in the legislative elections last month, from January the Congress will be divided and committed to immobility. That is why the message of the Ukrainian president is to convince each of the legislators, Democrats or Republicans, that investing in the defense of their country “is not charity, but a global investment in security and democracy.” Something above the party colors and bitter divisions of our time that merits the US leadership “remaining solidly bicameral and bipartisan” when it comes to aid to Ukraine, he pleaded in his appearance before the joint session of the Congress.
Russia is not the enemy of Ukraine, but of Europe, the West and international peace in general. It’s only a matter of time before they attack other allies again if we don’t stop them now, she warned. And the advantage of fighting in Donbas is that “Ukraine has never asked American soldiers to fight on its soil.” Zelensky promised that his forces would withstand the Russian onslaught without complaining “or ever surrendering.” Biden approved the day before his arrival a new batch of $1.8 billion in military assistance that includes Patriot batteries.
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